


Bloody Down Both Sides

by Plooby



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: I mean blink and you might miss the implication, I mean there's a lot of pornography here, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, but it is a going assumption, here AO3 have this lengthy imagination adventure I had about my DA2 protagonist, look all that matters is I had a good time, maybe you will have one too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:35:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21665272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plooby/pseuds/Plooby
Summary: A story told around the edges about all the complex ways power gets used to inflict harm, and about Elwyn Hawke and Fenris fumbling through past trauma to arrive, eventually, at each other.(Alternately: a lot of fenhawke romance retelling wrapped around an apologia for my rather nonstandard mage Hawke characterization? Yes.)
Relationships: Fenris/Male Hawke
Comments: 16
Kudos: 39





	1. Chapter 1

_Take a picture or two  
Just to remember the view  
Leave a mark on the door  
As an empty warning sign  
From one who's gone before  
But isn't here any more  
  
Let the crust form on my skin in the sun  
When I get done _

Really, it was his own fault, like always. Normally, he hid himself with the ease of a lifetime of practice: it was simple enough to wrap up a staff to look like an ordinary cudgel -- and to use it like one, too, at least when anyone was looking -- and no less so to choose smuggling over sell-swording out of his uncle's grim bargain. No one in Athenril's crew blinked an eye at the pantomime of the two brothers, the one a soldier who could fight, the other a scholar who couldn't, but had a head for plans and convincing those who needed it. On the rare occasion things did get rocky, Carver could swing a sword out front, and Elwyn could hang back and slip healing spells through the chaos of metal and bone with no one the wiser. It went a lot more cleanly than it ever had when Carver and Bethany had used to do the same (it still hurt shockingly to remember), even if Elwyn wasn't as practiced at it as she had been. Even now that their service had ended, when Elwyn took work of a rougher sort, Aveline and now Varric seemed to fall in just as neatly on either side of him, rounding out the crowd that kept him hidden in the middle. It made a man wonder what he had ever done to deserve such quick loyalty.

But as they drove through the cobwebbed, crumbling mansion, the monstrous silhouettes of shades seeming to rear up out of every pocket of shadow the torchlight from outside could barely touch, the air thick with clanging steel and hard breath, one of the demons got in under the guard of the marked elf -- Fenris -- before he could seem to react. Elwyn didn't see it until it was too late, couldn't do anything -- not until the shade had clawed hard at Fenris's exposed arm, tearing at him as it tried to haul him in and strike at his face. Fenris wrenched away fast and hauled back for a strike that cleaved the thing's whole body raggedly right down the middle, but he was grimacing when he did, and his arm was gashed deeply almost from wrist to shoulder. The lines of blood cut interrupting across the lines of lyrium in his skin, looking more black than red in the dark.

And Elwyn moved without thinking, instinctive in his alarm. He was only a step from Fenris, it had just happened so blasted fast, and he moved in and wrapped his hand around the injured arm above the elbow in no time at all. Fenris's skin was slick with sweat and almost feverishly hot to the touch, the not-quite-unpleasant magical thrum of the lyrium markings bursting into a full-on crackle in Elwyn's awareness. He answered it with his own power, unfolding the healing into Fenris's flesh that would force it to knit up muscle and regrow skin.

The wounds closed at once, leaving just the blood on the surface that had smeared under Elwyn's fingers. And then Fenris jerked his arm away from Elwyn's grip so hard it must have hurt him, enough to almost make him stumble backward across the uneven floor.

It was dark, but not too dark to see Fenris's face as he jerked his chin up to look at Elwyn: the wide, wild glint of his eyes, the lip curling up from his teeth in a faint unconscious snarl. It hit with the force of a physical slap. Elwyn reeled.

Aveline and Varric were in the next room, Aveline hovering with shield and sword over Varric where he knelt picking and cursing a lock in equal measure. Neither of them had seen anything, as far as Elwyn knew, or were aware of him and Fenris now standing and staring at each other in the dark ruined kitchen, for a moment that was probably only seconds in spite of how it felt. And then it was over: as quick as any of it, Fenris had turned and was stalking away from him to join the other two, silent despite the rubble. Every line of him was rigidly tense.

There would be no pretending that hadn't happened. Not that he could have expected otherwise.

Elwyn let his eyes shut for just a second, and let out the breath he'd just discovered he was holding. Which to regret more: forgetting himself that way at all, or springing it as a nasty surprise on someone who'd fought his way out of so much at the hands of someone so like him? Like tearing off his own friendly mask and revealing the same monster that should have been left miles behind. Did it matter which?

Probably not. Varric had them through the door by now, and he hurried to catch up.

\---

He hadn't realized how fully he had expected Fenris to be gone by the time they came out, probably never to be seen again, until he looked to the side outside the door and was jolted by the sight of Fenris there: leaning up against the ivy-clung wall, staring out into the nothingness of where the street's shadows pooled. He looked drawn and restless, but he was there. Just getting some air, like he'd said.

"It never ends," he said, when they'd all been there a moment, without at first looking around. "I tried to get away from magic, but it follows me everywhere. It's buried under my own skin -- " One hand around his own arm tightened, in a way that didn't appear conscious, even as he turned his head to fix Elwyn with his gaze -- "And, it seems, behind every other face I meet."

Elwyn didn't answer; he couldn't think of any immediate way to. He was very aware of his other two companions' shifting, complex discomfort behind him, even as they seemed very far away.

"You hide what you are," Fenris said. There was no apparent rancor in it, but no question, either. Elwyn did his best to meet his gaze.

"I have to."

"Why?" Fenris had turned fully to face him by now, and took a step closer still. He was studying Elwyn's face closely; his eyes were clear and steady and very beautiful, and hard to look at for all manner of reasons. "Not why do you do it, but why create the need? What's worth apostasy to you?"

"I'm just trying to survive," Elwyn said -- before whatever he could feel Aveline, uneasy, stirring to say. He tried a smile in spite of himself, a wan, wry little thing. "Like all of us."

Fenris watched him another second, and his face tightened, mouth twisting. "A lot of unforgivable things are done in the name of survival."

That caught him as off-guard and clawed as deep as the shade had done to Fenris inside. His smile slid away all at once, his gaze finally dropping. "I can't say that's not true," he said, softer than he'd intended. "But I can try to do better."

"Take it easy, friend." That was Varric, at last, stepping up with a friendly clap of a hand on Elwyn's arm. Low on it, anyway. It was probably just force of habit: jumping into the middle of the tension to shred it to bits, the way only he could seem to. "Hawke's all right, as mages go."

When he could risk looking up at Fenris again, Elwyn was surprised to find that steady gaze had softened: whether at anything Varric had said, or anything he himself had, or the way his expression had looked at what Fenris had said, it was impossible to tell. In any case, the tension had gone from his brow and mouth, and his tone was a touch gentler as he said, "I imagine I seem ungrateful. If so, I apologize; nothing could be further from the truth." He hesitated a moment, and then reached to his belt. "I may not have found Danarius, but I still owe you a debt. Here's all the coin I have, as Anso promised."

"Keep it." That raised both Fenris's eyes again and his eyebrows, and Elwyn found himself again unsteady in the face of his steadiness, wrong-footed. "I -- I don't need to be paid for this, and certainly not all you have. I was glad to help you."

"Oh, great, this again," Varric might have muttered behind him, in the midst of ambling past them toward the square. Nothing would seem to hold Elwyn's attention, though, but the way Fenris's gaze seemed to pierce all through him, down to the very core.

"You spent all night waylaid into a stranger's fight, and you want nothing for it?" Elwyn could only find it in himself to shake his head, and Fenris hesitated another long moment before relaxing away from his purse. "That's... very generous. ...Thank you."

"You're quite welcome. I only wish it could have ended better." He paused before voicing his next thought: "Will you be safe? Will this Danarius come after you again?"

Fenris shot him the ghost of a hard smile. "I'd more than welcome him to." He gave Elwyn only a moment to consider that, though, before letting out a rough breath. "I must confess, though, I don't know how long that might take. Or what I ought to do in the meantime." His gaze roamed Elwyn's face again, searchingly, and surely there was no reason at all for the mingled prickle of heat and nerves that crawled up Elwyn's spine at his regard. "I think we worked well together, and you seem to be about some interesting business. Should you need assistance, I'd gladly render it."

It wasn't exactly what Elwyn had expected, to say the least. "You want to help me? Even knowing what I am?"

Something of that same thaw as before stole back into Fenris's features: still guarded, but easing at the eyes and mouth, just that much warmer. "If I'm being honest, I wouldn't have expected anyone to help me tonight," he said, quietly. "And least of all one of your kind. It's not something I'll soon forget." He paused a moment, in thought. "I don't think I _do_ know what you are -- not entirely -- but I'm willing to find out. And I hate to carry a debt for long."

"Fair enough, I suppose," Elwyn said, after an awkward beat, trying another small smile. "Well -- you aren't wrong, I may be in need of help before long. I could only welcome yours. Where would I find you?"

"I'll be right here." At Elwyn's look, he flashed another second of that hard, grim smile. "If Danarius wishes his mansion back, he's welcome to come and claim it himself."

Elwyn nodded, only hesitating a second. "Then I look forward to it."

It was only when he was heading out to the square where Varric had gone and heard his footsteps doubled that he realized Aveline had remained at his back. She had been quieter than he might have expected, and he had been more distracted than he might have liked to explain. When he turned his head to glance back at her, he found her looking at him already, in a way someone else might have thought was measured and mild.

"I hope you know what you're doing," she said, with the apparent permission of his look. He smiled, a little more easily this time.

"When have I ever?"

She laughed -- honestly, he thought. "It's something you may want to consider, then." She had come up level with him by now, and both of them settled to a stop as she chose her next words. "I don't think I have to tell you why any of that is trouble. You may regret choosing to involve yourself so quickly."

"What would you have preferred I do?" he asked, meeting her now unsmiling look. "Let some Tevinter slavemaster swoop him back to Maker knows what kind of misery? I don't remember hearing you object when I first made the offer."

"No, you don't, because you didn't." She sighed, breaking long enough to scrub her fingers over her forehead. "But I don't think 'ignore slavery' and 'make yourself responsible for a dangerous fugitive' were your only two options, either."

"I haven't made myself responsible for him. As I'm sure he'd agree." At the look she gave him for that, though, he could only laugh. "Thank you for looking out for me, Aveline. I'll mind myself."

She gave what he found a rather ostentatious snort, for the circumstances, but didn't argue further. "It's late, anyway. You should be home. Give my regards to your mother and Carver."

Elwyn supposed he could have said something in Gamlen's defense, but why press his luck? "And give mine to the guard."

"I won't," Aveline said, pleasantly enough. His soft laugh followed her as she walked away, and then all he could do was catch back up with Varric for the walk back. They made their way amid amiable, forgettable conversation to the market square, and the long precarious run of steps that took them back down in the world, both literally and metaphorically. Lowtown was too quiet even for most muggers at this small hour, and he waved Varric goodnight at the Hanged Man, wished the sleepy-eyed girl under the lamppost a good evening's trade, and slipped back into Gamlen's house without incident. Mugwort cracked an eye open and thumped his heavy tail on the boards a time or two when Elwyn entered, earning himself a scratch behind the ears, but otherwise the grubby little house showed every sign of deep sleep.

Elwyn moved as quietly as possible around the main room and the much smaller one he shared with Carver, drawing water into a basin and stripping to the waist to wash as best he could from the night. He untied his spill of braids from the gathered tail at the back of his head, as well, and was able to coax at least a few last drops from the bottle of oil he could ill afford, working it into his scalp around the roots. Carver had jabbed at him a time or two that he was vain of his hair, and he supposed Carver's much shorter twists were more practical, but it was just force of habit by now to keep them up. And in Lothering, it had always been Bethany who braided it for him: laughing with him at the wild, woolly drifts it made when loose, then taking hours to put it right again, complaining all the while of how it tired her fingers. And weaving in just touches of magic too faint to detect, to help speed and strengthen her work, and make it last. Mother had taken up the job since they had come to Kirkwall, without that last piece, but also without a single complaint. He had never once thought that he would miss them so much.

The ache was inescapable, lurking around every corner, but he found an unexpected comfort in that too. At least it kept her near.

Tonight, though, what he found his mind kept twisting back to was what had just happened: the trap disarmed, the search that had come to naught, the strange elf at the center of them both. The last most of all by far, he was forced to admit to himself. Alone now, with only one candle to show himself in the dull metal mirror he'd propped up, it was harder to deny the hot thrum of attraction that had kept blindsiding him all night, when he watched Fenris move or looked in his eyes. He liked Fenris, from what little he knew of him, and respected him: his intelligence and honesty and determination, and the dignity and self-possession with which he carried himself. But that respect and admiration mingled uneasily in him with far baser things. An intrusive, distracting awareness of Fenris's lithe strength, and the smooth angular beauty of his features, for one. The memory, burned like a brand into the hand that had touched him, of the heat of his skin.

Elwyn winced away from those thoughts, though, and with such force that he could no longer bear to meet his reflection's eyes. He had no right to them. He had only to remember the way Fenris had looked, after wrenching back from that same touch, to know how unasked-for his desire was, and how surely unwelcome. It would be monstrous to inflict it on Fenris himself, who hadn't even had the chance yet to take retribution for another mage's crimes against him. The only decent thing to do was forget it entirely.

But however Elwyn might try, he couldn't quite seem to do that yet. The shame of it just went on sitting at the back of his throat, thick and sour.

He dashed the last of the water from his face and hands, brushing out the drops that had caught in the curls of his beard, and shrugged into a softer shirt to sleep in, with a heavy exhale that he kept silent under the slow rhythm of Carver's breath. It was surely almost dawn by now, but he could snatch a few hours abed before he had to be up again, and looking for a bit more coin to scrape together. It would be good to close his eyes for a while, and put all of this aside.

Assuming, of course, that his restless thoughts would let him.

\---

Elwyn preferred to think of himself as well-mannered, at his best, but knocking on what splintered, ivied bits were left of the mansion door beggared what absurdity he could countenance. He clambered his awkward way through them, instead, into the dim ruin of a foyer. The gilt entry doors hung askew on their hinges, with one buckled in the middle, and dark knife-marked hollows in both where gems appeared to have been pried out of them; a shattered end-table lay two-legged on its side amid a smashed vase and the strew of its missing limbs, below a portrait on the wall clawed open to the blank sag of its backside. Dust thickened every breath of air.

He didn't know why it should faintly surprise him, to see its condition so unchanged. Surely he hadn't expected Fenris to go around tidying up? The mansion was only bait and camouflage, not a home. Fenris had no need to make it his own, and it was hard to imagine him having the inclination.

Perhaps it was only that the idea was so foreign: not having a home in that way at all. Nowhere to go where you slid into place like the last tile in a mosaic, fitting your rough edges just so along those of others who at least understood them. No place to rest safe for a while, however poor it might otherwise appear. The thought was distressing, on a number of levels, and Elwyn strove to push it aside.

"Fenris?" he called from the bottom of stairs as he came to them, leaving dusty tracks behind him into the gloom. He wouldn't have doubted that Fenris had known the second he came inside, but it seemed only polite. "I thought I might stop by. I'm sorry to intrude."

"Hawke," floated back down, from the bedchamber on the floor above, no question in it. "Come up."

He found Fenris in an upholstered chair that had somehow survived intact, pulled up to a fire on the hearth. He was even still mostly armored -- ready for a fight at a moment's notice, Elwyn thought, or to flee into the night. Though he raised his head at once from watching the flames when Elwyn came to the door, fixing him with that assessing stare, some of the coiled tension that had always been in him the few times they'd worked together was gone: he reclined in the chair with long legs sprawled ahead of him, painted in the shifting orange light, with what appeared to be a dust-streaked bottle of wine curled loosely in one hand. It was not at all an easier view of him to be greeted with, and Elwyn found himself clinging to looking in Fenris's eyes with the tenacity of a drowning man to a tow-rope.

"I hadn't realized you would be making social calls," Fenris said, with a slight curve in his mouth, and then drew himself forward in the chair to face Elwyn more fully. "I fear my hospitality is disgraceful."

"I'll excuse you for not laying out a banquet this time," Elwyn said, with a small smile, which earned him a bit of a laugh he'd no right to expect. "I've appreciated your help of late, of course, but -- I just wanted to know how you were getting on here."

That seemed to bring Fenris up short in the midst of however he would have responded to the rest. His brows lifted, and his gaze on Elwyn felt uncomfortably sharp suddenly: curious, maybe a bit amused, and more intent than ever. He said nothing of whatever might have been on his mind, though, and just as Elwyn was starting to falter and shift under his regard, he lifted the bottle in his hand up into the light instead. "I found the wine cellar," he said. "Does that answer your question?"

It surprised Elwyn into a laugh, clearing some of the tension that had threaded up his spine. "That depends on the wine."

Fenris tilted and twisted it in the firelight, watching the etching in its side light up in an unfamiliar script. "Agreggio Pavali. One of the better years, even. There were six bottles of it -- a small fortune's worth." He paused, apparently in thought, and then his eyes turned back up to Elwyn's. "Would you like some? I don't have glasses, I'm afraid."

"I'll pass, but thank you." Fenris nodded, and gestured to a padded bench on the other side of the fireplace, another of the few surviving furnishings. It seemed that most everything that could be used had been drawn in around the fire, more like an encampment than a room in service.

"Sit, at least. I don't mind company."

Elwyn crossed to the bench, which at least gave him an excuse not to look at Fenris rising out of his own chair in one liquid motion, and taking a pull directly from the neck of the bottle as he wandered toward the fire. All the more reason to refuse a drink, perhaps. It was colder nearer the outside wall, not surprisingly given the state of it, and he could see the merits of staying so close to the flames. Fenris was looking at the bottle again by now, though, leaning on one forearm on the mantel, and he tried another smile. "I hope it's good, at least, if it's so costly."

"I find it to taste very much like wine," Fenris said, and shrugged at his laugh. "I don't have much of a head for the stuff. It certainly does carry its prestige in Tevinter, though." His gaze fell back to the fire, its light glaring off his eyes and rendering them unreadable. "Danarius used to have me pour it for his guests. My appearance intimidated them, he said, which he enjoyed."

That gave Elwyn fresh pause -- even as he swallowed his first thought, of how far off that seemed from his own reaction to it. It took him a moment to think how to respond instead. "I... wouldn't think the markings as frightful as all that."

Fenris glanced at him sidelong, and the edge of his mouth twisted lopsidedly in a way that was difficult to interpret. "It's more the context that matters," was all he said. He took another drink, and another look at the bottle -- and then, before Elwyn could react or respond, turned and flung the whole thing, still half-full, into the far wall. It exploded into a splatter of streaky running red and fragments of glass, but when Elwyn could pull his gaze back and look at Fenris, he found Fenris looking back at him, instead, not quite smiling. "It's good I can still take pleasure in the small things."

"I'm sorry," Elwyn said, quietly, after the moment of silence that seemed to demand. "For everything you've been through. It's unconscionable."

Fenris was already waving a hand as though to shoo the words away, though, turning away from him. "You don't need to be sorry. It wasn't your doing." He had turned back again before Elwyn could do more than draw breath to reply, in time to cut him off, pacing before the fire. "I don't want your sympathy, or anyone's. Or to speak of it further, for that matter."

"Are you certain?" He tried to keep his tone neutral, and not to shrink back from the look Fenris turned on him. "I'm willing to listen."

For a second, Fenris's brows and mouth tightened further... and then he drew in and released a slow breath, and appeared to relax somewhat with it, at least back to something like evenness. "That's not necessary. It's in the past; I'd prefer to keep it there, as much as I'm able." He let that sit a moment, and then sat again himself, although it was hard not to notice there was no sign of his more relaxed posture of earlier. "I suppose you may feel differently, though," he said, his gaze fixed now on Elwyn. "Have you ever wanted to return to Ferelden?"

Elwyn gave that more consideration than he might have from someone else, letting his own gaze slide away toward the flames. "I can't say that I haven't," he said, finally. "Lothering may be gone, but it was never that much more of a home than anywhere else, in itself. We moved a great deal when I was young, for -- I suppose obvious reasons. It's the land that's still my home, in a way Kirkwall isn't." He looked down at his fingers, linked between his knees, and then up at Fenris. "But it seems beside the point."

"Why should it?" Fenris had tilted his head on one side, making for a firelit view of the plane of his neck, laddered with lyrium markings, that served as an entirely unneeded distraction at present. "If you could go back to a place you call home, why wouldn't you want to?"

Elwyn spread his hands, his mouth lifting in half a smile. "My family is here," he said. "That's what's important. If they have things holding them here, then this is where I belong."

He could see that land with Fenris, although why exactly it did he couldn't have said: the way Fenris's brow smoothed and gaze softened as it dropped toward the floor. "I think I can understand that," he said, without looking up. "Still, to have the option... must be gratifying."

"You can't return to where you come from, then?" Elwyn asked, carefully, after a moment. Fenris was silent for a moment before shaking his head, and his gaze stayed fixed forward, his face betraying nothing.

"There are many places I can't return to," he said, and the closing of the matter was fairly palpable. Elwyn had no urge to press it.

"Do you plan to stay in Kirkwall?" he asked instead, and was surprised by the question's reluctance in his mouth. Somehow he hadn't fully entertained before the quite reasonable idea that Fenris might choose to move on, with his counter-trap failed and nothing else to hold him, and was uneasy with how much the thought dismayed him. 

Fenris only shrugged, for his part, sitting forward with elbows on his knees. "I haven't decided. It's as good a place as any, at least for now. Even if Danarius is sure to seek me out here again."

Elwyn tilted his head. "Are you certain of that? It has been some time. Perhaps you've made this all more trouble than it's worth to him."

But Fenris was shaking his head, a thin ghost of a smile on his lips. "I don't think you understand," he said, turning his gaze on Elwyn, "exactly how much I am worth to him." He let that sit a moment, and then went on: "At any rate, it's preferable for him to come for me than the alternative. I'd take the fight to him in Minrathous, if he ever truly did give up, but given his entrenchment there it would be a last resort. Better to make a stand here, from a fortified position." He paused another moment, and then tilted Elwyn a more honest, uneven smile that rather cut all through him. "Perhaps it's my having allies that's finally given him pause. That's a new wrinkle for us both."

"You've never sought out help before?" Elwyn asked. It was something he might have intuited, but still managed to take him off-guard. "You said you fled years ago -- in all that time?"

Fenris shrugged again. "I hired men, when I could steal the coin. Never anyone of substance, before you."

Elwyn grinned a bit once that had fully sunk in, ducking his head as though he could dodge Fenris's eyes and a slight ridiculous flush of warmth both. "Well, I'm -- touched that you think me of substance. It's not always a popular opinion."

That won a soft laugh from Fenris, a gift as welcome and unlooked-for as ever. "It should be." When Elwyn only smiled down at the floor, though, Fenris sat back in the chair, and fixed him with a steady, intent look. "I confess I can't entirely figure you out, Hawke. Every time I think I have the measure of you, there's something else I hadn't suspected." Elwyn glanced up at him, startled, and his mouth curved. "It keeps things interesting, at least."

Elwyn hesitated a moment at that, finding himself wrong-footed and no little discomfited. "Perhaps it's just that there's not so much to me as you seem to think, and you're overshooting the mark," he said when he could collect his thoughts, with an attempt at a little laugh. Fenris didn't answer it this time, though: just went on looking at him, still and thoughtful in the dancing light.

"I rather doubt that," was all he said, though with a somewhat gentler curve of a smile. That hung in the air a moment, and then Fenris seemed to draw himself up, letting out a breath. "I shouldn't keep you any longer, though. The hour is growing late, and your family will be looking for you." Elwyn moved to rise, obliging the implication, and Fenris went with him -- and this time, it was Fenris's gaze that turned down and away for a moment before he spoke. "I... appreciate the visit, as well as your concern. Even if it may not seem so. ...Thank you."

"The pleasure was mine," Elwyn said, with a depth of seriousness he wasn't sure he had intended. Fenris only favored him with a small smile again, though, and he kept his farewells as perfunctory as possible, to avoid reckoning with any of what either of them had said.

He escaped into a cold, clear night, his breath pluming as it seemed to relearn how to move freely in and out of him. There seemed to be too much movement inside him, all the same, a roiling all through his head and chest and stomach that he walked faster to try to calm, almost able to find the humor in how absurd it was to be so unsettled. Perverse, even: so exactly the wrong person, and at this, so exactly the wrong time and place. He must have a talent for disaster the likes of which the world had seldom seen.

But then, who would have been right, and when, and where? Perhaps it was more reasonable to expect than he knew.

Elwyn shook himself inwardly as he passed under the colonnade, and raised a hand on the other side to a guard he vaguely recognized from calling on Aveline. It didn't matter; that was the long and short of it. Fenris had his own business to be about, or he would eventually, and Elwyn had his. It was time to focus on the road ahead. He'd secure a place on the expedition come hell or high water (even if, in spite of what he'd said, he might not ask Fenris to join that company after all, to spend who knew how many days or weeks in the next bedroll over around an underground fire), and even if it surely wouldn't turn up the riches Carver was hoping for, there could at least be enough coin in the Deep Roads to provide for them all a little longer. He would put one foot in front of the other, and keep moving, until some sort of a future in this strange dangerous city came close enough that he could see its shape. The unwelcome cramp of want twisting inside him would loosen, given distraction enough, and time.

Everything would be all right.


	2. Chapter 2

As much as their acquaintance had begun with a necessary intrusion into Fenris's affairs, Elwyn had come to recognize, and respect, Fenris's desire for privacy. It was a commodity that he imagined would have been so rare to a former slave as to be of utmost value, and he took all the care he could not to threaten it unduly. He had noticed, of course, in the past few years, that Fenris seemed to become especially withdrawn and scarce around the time the season turned to spring, but even so he had never inquired about it, never wanted to pry. So he had never suspected the reason -- nor expected to hear the whole story from Fenris himself, from some distance into the last bottle of the Agreggio, so soon on the heels of a less willing violation.

Because it _had_ been a violation: what had happened with Hadriana, and his own presence in it. Fenris's misdirected fury, his throwing back in Elwyn's face the magic that painted him with the same brush as Fenris's tormenters, had stung, but it bothered him far less than did what Fenris had been put through as spectacle for him, for the others. Even magic notwithstanding, he felt complicit; and even beyond the private longing that time had only seemed to sharpen, not dull, he felt like a trespasser on what was not his. He had been made unwilling party to, essentially, a friend's humiliation -- his flaying open by a past that, no matter how much time went by, would never seem to let him go.

So for Fenris to add to that his confession of his escape in Seheron was startling, and... uncomfortable, in a number of respects. But also not his to refuse, if it was what Fenris needed.

"Thank you for telling me," Elwyn said quietly, when he was sure Fenris would say nothing more, which was the closest he could come to saying any of that aloud. "This can't be easy to talk about."

Fenris sat in uneasy silence for a moment, before taking another drink of wine that seemed to let him speak again. "I've never spoken of it to anyone before. I've never wanted to."

Elwyn nodded, although he didn't think Fenris especially noticed. "Did it help at all? To tell me?"

"Does it feel good to get it off my chest, you mean?" Fenris asked, with a hard sneering twist at the edge of his mouth. "No. ...And yes." He took a long, measured breath, his gaze still turned down. "Not the telling, perhaps, but... the listening ear. The knowledge that someone finds it of consequence, and would wait to be told." Elwyn hesitated too long, not knowing how to answer, and finally Fenris lifted just his eyes to Elwyn's face with a tiny smile. "It's not something I take for granted, even still. I'm grateful."

Elwyn smiled at the floor, unable to meet that look. "If it's a way I can help, then -- I'm glad. I wish there were more that I could offer."

He was aware of Fenris's eyes on him for a long moment more, although he still couldn't bring himself to look up. He couldn't have said what Fenris's expression was, but the regard itself rested on his skin like a brand: like it had sat a time in the fireplace before moving to touch him.

"May I ask you a personal question, Hawke?" Fenris asked after a moment, in a tone that seemed both gentler and lighter at once. It let Elwyn dare to look up into Fenris's eyes, and finding him smiling slightly again, answer with a smile of his own.

"It would be very churlish of me to refuse, under the circumstances."

Fenris laughed softly, acknowledging that with a nod. The question itself, though, seemed at first such a non sequitur that Elwyn thought he had misheard: "Are you _ever_ going to say anything?"

Elwyn stared at him, baffled, but he looked back with that same steadiness, and at last Elwyn could only huff something like a laugh. "I beg your pardon?"

"Are you ever going to say anything to me about it?" Fenris only repeated. When Elwyn just kept staring, he set down the bottle on the table in front of him, sitting forward a bit and fixing Elwyn with narrowing eyes. "Don't pretend ignorance -- not tonight, of all times. I'm not blind, Hawke, and I'm not stupid. I can see the way you look at me, when you think I'm looking elsewhere. I can see how you tense when I'm near." His gaze bored into Elwyn -- seemingly oblivious to how that had detonated inside him like a blast of ice, freezing him into utter, immobile stillness. "I've waited for you to mention it, or ask me for what you want from me. But it's been three years now, and you haven't." He paused a moment, leaving Elwyn buffeted by the whirlwind inside his head. "I must confess, I'm disappointed in you. I've never known you to fear to speak your mind, on any other matter."

"I'm sorry," was all Elwyn could seem to say at first, into the silence that followed. His voice sounded like a creaking bellows when he could force it out of himself, and he winced, at last able to wrench his fixed unseeing gaze away. "...I'm very sorry. I thought that I could hide it from you -- that I _had_ hidden it from you -- but that was foolish, I think." Every word came haltingly, when it came at all, his pulse hard in his throat. He could scarcely collect his thoughts into line enough to say them. "I never meant for you to know. It wasn't -- that I was afraid -- I didn't want to burden you with it." He took a breath, trying to steady himself. And trying, with all his strength, to meet Fenris's gaze again, which remained on him and betrayed nothing. "I didn't want to be _another_ mage who wanted something from you. Who felt entitled to something of you. Or even to let you believe that was what our friendship meant to me, even if it wasn't true. I -- " He rubbed a hand over his face, exhaling, and only then could finally find the courage to look at Fenris in earnest. "I'm sorry, Fenris. It should have been no one's concern but mine. I wouldn't have forced on you deliberately something I know that you don't want."

Fenris only watched him a moment, reclining in his chair, still no hint of his thoughts in his expression. It was only as he spoke again that a tiny, smirking smile cracked across his lips: "And how clever of you to know it, considering that I don't know what I want myself."

Elwyn could only frown at him, and eventually Fenris looked away from his eyes, down at his own hands as he turned them over. "The ritual that placed these markings on me was... extraordinarily painful. Beyond the words I have to describe it. And the memory of it is with me still." He drew a slow breath of his own, and let it out, before continuing. "It has been very difficult for me to feel that my body is my own. Let alone to find the desire to invite another to it." His eyes rose to Elwyn's again, after a moment's pause, with another small smile. "But what have you ever been for me, if not an exception?"

"I don't have to be," Elwyn said -- almost too fast, stumbling on himself. His pulse had run wild again inside him, this time for very different reasons, and he struggled for focus. "Nothing -- nothing has to happen. If you don't want to -- "

"If I didn't want to, I would say so, and I would hope you would let that be the end of it," Fenris said, softly, cutting across all the rest of his fumbling. "I haven't said that the idea doesn't appeal. In fact, it _very_ much does." He held Elwyn's gaze all through that last, his lips soft and pliant as they shaped with full deliberation around the emphasis of _very_ , and had Elwyn needed a very suddenly full and insistent cockstand added to his list of distractions in this moment? He felt sure that he had not. "The matter is... complicated, for me, all the same. I would need time to consider it." Fenris seemed to consider that a moment, and then let out a small sigh. "Perhaps on a less auspicious night than this one."

Elwyn managed a small smile of his own, hoping it gave no sign of how he wrestled on all fronts: against his quick breath, his pounding heart, the heat under his skin. "There's no rush," he said, all the same, and meant it even so. "Take all the time you need. ...And should you find the time never seems right, I hope we can continue as we have."

That seemed to startle Fenris -- and then the slow return of his smile seemed fuller, and truer, than ever. "I hope so as well," he said. "...You really are a most unusual man, Hawke. I still never know entirely what to make of you."

Elwyn laughed, dropping his head forward. "I'm not anything special."

"We'll have to agree to disagree." Fenris's smile lingered as he leaned forward to offer the bottle of wine again, and Elwyn took it, and a long swallow, gratefully. "So. The night's still young, and I think we've talked enough about me. I don't suppose you have any sordid tales of your own past you'd like to tell?"

It startled Elwyn into another small laugh, even as he hesitated. The change in subject was rather on the obvious side, but he thought it best to let that slide. "How sordid were you thinking?"

"You tell me." Fenris paused to consider a moment, tipping the liquid slightly in the bottle Elwyn had returned to him, before looking up. "I suppose the most obvious question is: how did someone who believes so strongly in restraint for mages come to be an apostate himself?"

If nothing else had helped to cool his blood, that would have done the job. Even beyond where the question led, there were more recent memories it conjured: the fugitives he'd turned back over to the templars outside that cave by the shore, and the contempt in Grace's eyes as she'd been taken back into custody, which he'd found himself unable to meet. Fenris had watched that byplay with no apparent pity, however, and it had given Elwyn a cramp of strange envy -- the idea of being so secure in one's conviction.

Now, Elwyn hesitated even longer this time, before shaping his mouth in another smile he didn't much mean. "That... is the obvious question, yes." He glanced at Fenris. "You really care to hear about this?"

"I wouldn't have asked, otherwise," Fenris said, almost smiling back. Elwyn nodded, and looked back down at his hands, teetering on the fine edge of how to proceed. He could dodge the matter entirely, he supposed; but that hardly seemed fair, after what Fenris had told him tonight. He could give half an answer, but that also struck him as a poor response, and he felt sure that Fenris would see through it anyhow. The truth, then? Could he say, in remotest honesty, that he didn't owe Fenris at least that much?

"You know our father was an apostate as well?" he asked, presently. Fenris raised his eyebrows and nodded, and Elwyn nodded back. "That's not why, but it's part of it. He fled the Circle as a young man to elope with my mother, after they met by chance and fell in love." He propped his elbows on his knees, folding his hands in front of his chin and resting it on them. "It's no excuse, but in his defense, I never had the impression he thought it was either. He was... a good man, I think, all the same. He was careful and thoughtful and deliberate in everything I saw him do, and he would never allow anyone to be harmed if he could help it. I admired him very much when I was growing up, until the day he died.

"Most children don't start to show signs of magic until they start becoming adults in all the ordinary ways -- at twelve or thirteen, often, or maybe ten or eleven. My magic came early, though, relatively speaking. It happens sometimes. It started when I was eight." He looked at Fenris momentarily, finding his eyes, and then looked away. "I didn't honestly know it for what it was at first. Of course I knew what magic was, but there was no connection in my mind between the grand rituals at the Circle tower from my father's stories, and the little sparks I could make between my fingers if I concentrated." He held up his hand as he spoke without thinking, watching it move. "I knew it was something I couldn't let show, though -- just because I never saw anyone else doing it in public, not even my father. To me, it just seemed like a pleasant secret. An amusement to keep to myself. We were living in Denerim then, for the time being, on the outer edge of the city where there were patches of wood still between where the houses were clustered. The twins were in swaddling clothes, and my father and mother were entirely caught up in tending to them. It was nothing to slip out through the trees and play alone, with the things I could make happen."

He sat back on the bench, thinking, staring at the floor without really being aware of it. In another time and place.

"There was a templar who had managed to find my father's trail, and was closing in," he went on, after a moment. "I don't know how -- my father was very careful -- but he had tracked his fugitive as far as the little neighborhoods where we lived. He was in the market square not far from our home one day, asking questions. He saw me alone on my errands and asked me: had I ever heard of a man who lived nearby named Malcolm Hawke? I said I had not, as I had always been taught to do." He was aware of Fenris watching him, but did not look up. "I did it poorly, though, apparently. He seemed satisfied, and sent me on my way, but when I went, he followed me. And when I went into the grove where I played at magic, he followed me still, and saw what I was doing."

Elwyn brought his hands to his mouth, pressed them in front of it without fully realizing it until he had to pull his fingers away to speak. "He confronted me. He came storming out of the trees, shouting, his hand on his sword. ...I think now that he must have been very young -- newly-minted, fresh from his vows, and all nerves -- but to me, he looked like a wall of steel. Impossibly tall, furious, armored head to toe. The end of the world." He took a rough breath. "He said... he had come for one apostate, but he would gladly take two. He said I _did_ know Hawke, I must, and unless I gave him up it would go very hard for me. He grabbed my arm. It hurt, with his hand in a gauntlet. I tried to pull away, and he thought I was trying to flee him, and grabbed for me harder. He bent down to wrestle me into place. He looked so angry.

"I did something. Something I didn't know I could do. It felt like... screaming, but not with my voice. Taking all the breath inside me and pushing it violently out." He closed his eyes for a beat of his heart, then opened them. "I produced a tremendous burst of force. It threw him off his feet, and across the width of the grove like a child's doll. I think he would've been thrown much further if he hadn't been stopped. There... had been a cottage in the grove, once, that had been abandoned, and now only half of it was left: the join of three of the walls, with one crumbled in, and the roof rotted. I don't know what knocked down the fourth wall, because the others were stone, and solid." He paused to breathe again, slow, deep. "He struck the corner hard, at a bad angle. The stones stove his armor in at the back, and his own armor crushed his chest. I'm sure I don't have to explain to you; you know what a danger a maul is to a man in plate. It was over in an instant. Pure ill luck." The pause that he took there startled him faintly with the depth of silence in the room. After a moment, he added, "I think about that often. How if he'd stood only a few feet to the left or right, or if the cottage's crumbled wall had faced the north instead of west, he probably would have gotten back to his feet no worse for wear. Things would have been entirely different, but for the space of a few steps. ...I suppose I would be studying in a Circle now, and none of this would ever have happened.

"I didn't know what I had done at first, at any rate. I was barely aware of flinging him away, and then I saw him strike and collapse, and when he didn't rise again, I crept closer to see what had happened." He stared into the shadows across the room, not seeing them at all. "He was not dead yet. Dying, not dead. His upper half was terribly misshapen, when I could see it better, and his eyes were glassy and his mouth wide. When I stood over him, his eyes rolled up toward me, and he moved his mouth as though he were trying to speak, although there was no sound. He was convulsing for lack of breath already; his lungs must have been jellied inside him. All that came from his mouth was a gush of blood. It spilled out through his lips and down his chin, and I watched it drip onto his chest."

He stopped again for a moment to gather his thoughts: to put what he could see behind his eyes, in this moment or in any other, into words. "I could have gone for help. I don't think he could have been saved, but I could have gone and called for someone to try. I think I even wanted to. But I could not move any part of myself, no matter what I wanted. I felt frozen in place. I just stood, and watched him." His voice faltered to a stop, then started again. "It took him a long time to die. ...Probably not _that_ long, really. Surely less than ten minutes, most likely less than five. It was suffocation, ulltimately, and that's a terrible death but not the slowest one. But it felt like the whole length of a life, that I stood over him, watching him stop moving and awareness fade out of his eyes. In a way, ever since, I have felt that I am standing there still.

"I don't know how long I stayed there, after he was dead. Long enough that my father came to look for me, and he found me standing in the grove over the man I had killed. He pulled me away, and held me to him, and that -- cracked me, at last, enough that I could tell him what I had done." Elwyn dragged his gaze out of the shadows, finally, and blinked them away, and that seemed to let him move again now, settling a bit back into his skin. "He was very grave, but he told me it would be all right, and I would be safe, and sent me home to tell my mother to pack. He had friends in the city who helped to conceal him, and he called on them to help him hide the body, and then late that night, take it weighted with stones to the cliffs above the sea. Though I never knew any of that until much later." He sighed, looking down at his hands. "I'm certain the corpse washed ashore in time, but I don't know if he was ever found, or identified if he was. If so, we were long gone by then. I wonder if he had a family, and friends in the Order. Do they still not know what became of him? It's been more than twenty years, but it's so hard to stop hoping when you don't know anything for certain. Does a part of them still believe that someday, he'll come home?"

He lapsed into silence there for a moment, and then picked up his thread again. "We fled the city in the dead of night, after my father returned, and after a time we joined a caravan that traveled for weeks to the west. I don't remember much of that time, which I imagine is for the best. I was... very unwell. Never really fully awake, but when I slept I would wake every few hours screaming, from terrible nightmares of the templar broken and bleeding." He managed a wan smile at one corner of his mouth. "Bad enough even without two infants to look after too. All the same, my parents were extremely patient and kind with me -- more so than anyone would have any right to expect. We settled in a village in the end, in a farmstead set far enough apart from the other houses that no one would be alarmed by me, and eventually, I began to recover myself, bit by bit. Though it was harder because -- " Elwyn stopped in the middle of that thought, pressing his lips together, and then tried coming back to it by another route. "As soon as we had a place to stay, my father began insisting that I begin to study magic with him. He told me he had never wanted this for me, but it couldn't be taken back, and so I needed to learn to control my abilities. It was the only way that I could keep what had happened from ever happening again -- or something far worse. He was extremely firm on the matter. And he was right, of course... but I wanted no part of it. When it was time for our lessons I hid from him, under the eaves or between barrels in the root cellar, and shook and cried as though in fear of my life. All I wanted was for the magic to be cut out of my body entirely, to never have to think of it again. I couldn't stand the idea of _using_ it -- even to master it.

"So that was a torturous few months, for both of us, I'm sure. Eventually, though, he found a way to coax me to it: I found the idea of healing much more bearable than any other use. I think the first magic he ever convinced me to try without a battle was curing a scrape on my sister's knee, after she fell learning to walk." Another faint smile twisted at his mouth, before dropping away. "He taught me to heal, and I learned to control my magic that way. I still wasn't well, though, even then -- not for years afterward, well after we'd moved on to Lothering. I no longer woke screaming, but I still had nightmares of killiing the templar, again and again, almost every night. My moods were wild: I was angry or terribly sad for no reason, much of the time, lashing out at those least deserving. In some ways, it was worse as I grew older. I spent much of the years between childhood and manhood behaving terribly: ignoring my parents or taking my frustrations out on them, or trying to lose myself in pilfered spirits or whichever plough-boy would have me in his father's hayloft." He huffed a whisper of a laugh, although with no humor in it. "And I knew everything, as all young men of that age are sure they do, and no one else truly understood the nature of my crime, least of all my parents. As a child, of course, I had accepted without question that my father had protected me, and hid what I had done, because if he had done it, it must be the right thing to do. In time, though, I came to believe differently. I decided he had been wrong to conceal the murder that I had committed, no matter the reason. I should face consequences... and eventually, I began to devise a plan to turn myself in. Not to the templars -- I was still very frightened of them, and couldn't stomach that idea -- but to the Circle itself. I would run away and make the journey to the tower, and submit myself to the judgment of the First Enchanter." He paused, and then added, "Which I had the idea might end in my being made Tranquil, but I was willing to accept that. To be honest, at the time, having my magic, dreams, and emotions taken from me sounded less like a punishment than a relief.

"I made my plans in great detail, in secret. I suppose they comforted me, in a way. But when it came to acting on them... I dragged my feet." Elwyn's gaze fell back to the dusty floor, in thought, before he found his thread again. "I wasn't afraid of what would happen, so I thought, but the prospect of actually going ahead with it was still intimidating. The journey itself -- and leaving behind a family that was all that I had ever known. Year after year, I told myself that I would go at last, and year after year cowardice still held me back." He sighed, linking his hands atop his knees. "And then Bethany's magic began to show itself; and that, finally, was the end of it for me. The ability doesn't always run in families, but more often than not, it does. It would be impossible to present myself as a rogue mage without drawing scrutiny down on my family, one way or another. I knew my father could look after himself, as he had always done... but Bethany was a child, my baby sister. I could make the choice to be confined, but I could not make it for her. Not before she was ready to make it for herself." He closed his eyes, briefly, then shrugged more lightly than he could ever have felt. "So I gave up the idea, at least for the time being. And then it wasn't long before my father's health began to fail, leading to the illness that would kill him, and he had to retire to only teaching Bethany and me, while I took his place tending the farm and keeping the house with my mother. He told me once, in those years, that if he did not recover he would trust me to care for our family, and I took that very much to heart. I could no longer think of leaving; I was needed where I was. ...And in a way, that helped to ground me again. I had a purpose, and a way to pay my debt, even if I couldn't do it directly. It was like learning healing: if I could do some good, and not just more harm, I could bear the thought of continuing to get away with it. And the dreams continued to fade, with each passing year, as I grew older. By now I have them almost not at all." He lifted his eyes, finally, and found Fenris's. "I suppose I could have turned myself in to Kirkwall's Circle, when we arrived. I suppose I could now. But I still needed to look after my mother here, more than ever; and even now, if I did, I don't know what would become of her. The house is in my name, and I'm quite certain that captured apostates can't hold deed or title. I couldn't send her back begging to Gamlen's door, after all of this, for the sake of my own conscience."

"Nor do I think the viscount would much know what to do anymore, without your counsel," Fenris said -- jolting Elwyn senselessly near out of his skin, at the sound of his voice after so long in silence. The comment was light, as was his tone, but Fenris's gaze was serious and watchful. "I wouldn't have suggested you should surrender yourself to the Circle. ...I think that would be a great loss to many, in fact."

Elwyn blinked, raising his head a bit higher at last. "I'm... surprised to hear you say that."

"Are you really? Considering how much I personally have benefited from your freedom?" Fenris's mouth curled slightly, although that shadowed look still hung about his eyes. "I'm not a superstitious savage, quailing at a mountebank's parlor tricks, Hawke. I don't revile magic for the sake of what it is. What I despise is how easily, and gladly, mages use it to wield power and harm against those who lack it. I've yet to see you do either, through magic or any other means. If you actually are the rare mage capable of ruling over himself, I don't see the need for others to rule over you as well." He paused a moment, apparently to consider, while Elwyn reeled privately at the impact of all that. "I find it difficult to imagine Anders, for example, regretting to this day the slaying of a templar who had threatened him as a child. I rather think he might need to be discouraged from marking the occasion with a parade."

"Anders _is_ a child," Elwyn said, with a slightly sharper edge on its dismissal than he might have intended. "If there's an argument to be made for the harm of being raised in the Circle, it's whatever it's done to his thinking. The abuses he sees are real, I won't argue with that, but his conclusions from them are so black and white as to be nonsensical. Mages haven't asked for our power, so we should bear no responsibility for it; one templar misuses the authority of his position, so mages should answer to no authority at all; not every mage falls to the influence of demons, so no precautions should be taken to prevent others from doing so. The creature bound to him must be either a particularly subtle demon encouraging him deliberately in every wrong direction, or a spirit so naïve to the nuances of the mortal plane that it can't actually distinguish right from wrong in any but the broadest of strokes. I don't think it even matters which, at this stage." He caught himself up short there, though, at Fenris's raised eyebrows and small smile, and sighed. "I wish I could reach him. I truly do. I do feel for him, and I think he genuinely means well. But he's determined that everything I say is in the mindless service of conformity, and I incapable of having actual reasons for what I believe. He seems to drift a little further into chaos every day, and the best I can seem to do is shout after him to turn around." He took another steadying breath, and rubbed between his brows, with a sheepish smile of his own. "...But I don't have to tell you any of that. Enough about him; I'm sorry for getting on the subject.. It only... preys on me, sometimes."

"Yes, I may have noticed," Fenris said, so drily that it made Elwyn's smile a bit more genuine. "My mistake bringing it up. I only meant that the good you've done seems to me to quite outweigh the ill that you remember."

"I hope you're right," Elwyn said, in a tone much softer. And then, for a moment, they were both quiet.

"Thank you, as well, for telling me," Fenris finally said. Elwyn looked up at him to find his gaze direct and serious again, and softer now than was at all comfortable to look at. "I appreciate your honesty. I didn't realize how loaded the question might be."

Elwyn half-smiled down at his own hands, without much conviction. "I won't say we're even, but... I've never told anyone that, either, for what it's worth. Even my siblings never knew." He paused, and then added, "I think -- Carver still doesn't. Although we'd have to be on speaking terms for me to be sure."

Fenris nodded at that, he could see from the corner of his eye. "And did it help _you_ , to tell?"

It startled him into a short laugh. "No," he said at once, and then after only a second or two more: "And yes. I see what you mean. Isn't that strange?"

"Not the strangest thing." Fenris picked up the bottle again, catching Elwyn's eye while lifting it in his direction, with a sharp curve beginning at his mouth. "A last toast, then: to the fallen. Wherever, and to whomever, they fell."

"I'll drink to that," Elwyn murmured, meeting his gaze at last; and after Fenris had swigged from the last of the wine and passed the bottle his way, he did, with what felt like decades of memory sunk in its blood-colored depths.

\---

He didn't see Fenris for some time after stumbling home that night, glad as never before for the new nearness of his own home to Fenris's refuge. Fenris did not come to the Hanged Man to play cards, or stop by the house to talk and critique old decorations with Mugwort draped rudely across his lap, or turn up mysteriously just when Elwyn needed support to look into some urgent city matter, all of which he was often wont to do. It should have been little cause for concern -- Fenris absenting himself unexplained for some length of time, appearing and speaking to no one, was also not at all unheard-of -- but under the circumstances, Elwyn couldn't seem to keep it from winding all his innards into a tighter and tighter ball inside him, with each day that passed. It was impossible not to think of the stories they had both just told after so long, or any of the other things they had spoken of, and wonder if some part of it had, finally, been too much to endure. If whatever fragile, inexplicable thread had bound Fenris into his strange life in Kirkwall had been broken at last.

They were foolish thoughts, maybe, but hard to shake away, all the same. Even so, in spite of all temptation, Elwyn did not call on Fenris either, or try to seek him out when he had chosen not to make himself known. If he needed time and space to mull over what had been said between them, then that was the least that he was owed.

And meanwhile, Elwyn might have woken a few times sweating in the night from the old dream of standing over the templar's ruined body, with breastplate deforming the chest inside it and blood painted all down its chin; he might also have fallen in spite of himself to replaying in his mind, with feverish, hungry intensity, the way Fenris had said _In fact, it_ very _much does._ If so, neither was anyone's business but his own. He went about his affairs: skirted the Qunari compound with a keen eye on the viscount's behalf, spent time with his mother, spoke with his other friends and acquaintances, and let everything else be as it was. He would believe that it would all settle itself, one way or another, and that would have to be good enough. It had always had to be so far.

So it came to pass that one evening, he returned home weary from errands around the city, and only bade Bodahn, Sandal, and his mother good night before trudging up to his room. He gently shooed Orana off from the last dusting she was sneaking in after her agreed-upon hours -- she still seemed very skittish about the idea that she should stop for the day at all, and he made a resigned mental note to just add to her week's wages again to compensate -- and set up a tub and drew and heated water himself, to soak in the bath for a while. When at last the dirt and the ache of the day had been soothed away somewhat, and the water disposed of, he found it in him to dress for home again and return downstairs, to check whether any more messages had been left at the door since the house had retired.

Which was how he found Fenris, when he turned to step into the front foyer: standing already inside the door, in the shadows between the sconces. Elwyn froze in place at the sight, in the first few seconds unable to respond in any way. Fenris hovered in place, long and lean and dark, an incongruously formidable figure in the room's elegance. He looked like the ghost of a fallen soldier, lingering in a house that had been put up on ground that was once his battlefield, not knowing what it no longer was. He did not look at Elwyn, nor, it seemed, at much of anything.

"Fenris?" Elwyn found himself saying when comprehension finally settled into place, and that seemed to break a suspension. Fenris moved out of shadow and toward him, head still down, with a speed and determination that seemed almost predatory. It was enough to nearly make him step back, with his pulse picking up pace for all variety of reasons.

"I've been thinking of you," Fenris said, low and fervent -- drawing up face-to-face with Elwyn, suddenly far too close to let him catch his breath. "In fact, I've been able to think of little else." He raised his eyes to Elwyn's at last, sending his heart thudding faster still, heat tingling out at once to every corner of him. They were more uncertain than he might have thought. More vulnerable. "Command me to go, and I shall."

"I don't want you to go," Elwyn said, after a struggling pause in which he could again say and think nothing. His voice was scarcely more than a dry whisper.

Fenris stared at him for a moment -- and then lunged at him, seizing him, crushing their mouths together in a flare of heat that tore thought away.

Elwyn caught him in his arms and clutched him in, dizzy, desperate, craning into the kiss like from drowning up to air. It was unthinkable just to be touching him, holding him. He hadn't touched Fenris deliberately one single time since that first disastrous healing, the same night they had met. Now Fenris's mouth was wet and open and tongue pressed against his, the hard hot weight of his body aligned tight along Elwyn's, all that there was in the world. His heart roared with it, threatening to pound him apart.

It was at once far too much and not near enough. With no conscious intent he pushed closer until he had crowded Fenris up against the wall, pinning them together, bracing his hands on either side to keep himself upright and Fenris close. It took him only seconds to catch himself, though, appalled at what he was doing; he dropped his hands at once and tried to draw back, to give Fenris more room and freedom, but Fenris only huffed a snarling breath and grabbed round both sides of his head, hauling him back in to kiss him harder. He shivered in Fenris's hands, his own hovering uselessly in the air before finding the sense to settle at Fenris's waist. They held him there with a gingerish tenderness that contrasted obscenely with the way that, seconds later, their hips rolled hard together.

Elwyn broke away on a hot gasp, Fenris's grasp still keeping their mouths close enough to share air. Only after a gulp for breath could he manage something like a shaky laugh. "We're... bound to scandalize _someone_ , if we do this here," he said in half a whisper, his forehead still leaned into Fenris's. "Come upstairs."

There was a question buried in that, whether he gave it voice or no. And Fenris nodded to it after only a pause for breath of his own, their skin sliding together where it touched. Elwyn's chest squeezed painfully around the joy of the answer: holding it tight, like a clutching fist.

He clasped Fenris's hand in his to lead him up the stairs, and Fenris let him; it almost felt natural, despite all the metal in between, and how even that touch was still thrilling. They were both silent until they reached his room, and he had shut the door behind them -- and then not a second after he had, it was Fenris who swarmed him, pulling him with all force away from the door and stumbling forward into the room. He bit at Elwyn's throat below the line of his beard, scattering gooseflesh up his back, before claiming his mouth again, parting it with his lips and pressing with his tongue. His fingers worked behind Elwyn's head as they kissed and moved, tugging the tie from around his braids with surprising delicacy for the sharp points of his gauntlets, and letting them fall loose to his shoulders. Elwyn clung to him, panting against his lips, moving his hands in greedy swaths over Fenris's back and sides just to feel the shape of him. His head buzzed, no thought in him at all.

After some uncountable moments of that, Fenris's arms pulled away from his back to do something between them, followed shortly by the _clunks_ of both his gauntlets tumbling to the floor. His unguarded arms wrapped back around Elwyn's middle, tightened there -- and lifted him off his feet, throwing him bodily backward to land splayed on his back on the bed. Before Elwyn could do more than blink upward and gasp for air, arousal stoked higher than he might have liked to admit at being so manhandled, Fenris had clambered up onto his hips, sitting over him with a look somewhere between smugness and fast-breathed hunger. He stooped on Elwyn, kissing him again, and pulled back only far enough to let him grab rough handfuls of Elwyn's tunic and work it up over his chest, up over his arms and away when he struggled them up over his head. His nipples tightened in the air, amid the light skim of curls over his skin. Then Fenris's palms were running down over his bared flesh, hot and traced in silver lines against the warmer brown of Elwyn's skin, and Elwyn was gulping ragged breath, arching and clutching at his arms.

He kicked his house-shoes feverishly aside as Fenris's hands slid to the waist of his breeches, and pushed up his hips as best he could with Fenris atop him. His breath shivered in and out of him while Fenris's fingers pulled open the lacings, and pushed the fabric down his hips and thighs to bare him, dragging maddeningly on the thick swell of his prick. It fell heavily against his belly once freed, tip slicking a glistening trail behind it. Fenris shifted on him to tug his last clothing away completely, and then was leaning back over him, staring with heat enough to sear him. Elwyn pawed clumsily up to Fenris's shoulders after a moment, then interrupted himself with a helpless wheeze of a laugh.

"I have no idea how any of that works," he confessed, his smile parted around his heavy breath. Fenris looked startled, maybe even hesitant -- and then he laughed too, and took Elwyn's hand to move it out of the way with a familiarity that again squeezed at his heart.

"Allow me," he said, deep and low in his chest, and sat back a bit to reach behind his shoulders and unfasten the front plate. With it tossed aside, even Elwyn's heat-hazed mind could make a bit more sense of things, and he was able to fumble Fenris's belt apart while Fenris tugged open the fastenings down his chest. He stripped each arm out of the complexities of his shirt and let it fall away as well, and left Elwyn struck for the moment into stillness at the unobstructed view of his markings: the full shape of the pattern of them, bracketing his chest and laddered down his arms and abdomen, uncomfortably suggestive lines sweeping down the muscles inside his hips and under his trousers. They were terrible to look at and very beautiful, if only for the way they drew the eye along the lines of his body itself, accentuating the skin and smooth muscle and bone in between. Elwyn tried not to stare at them, but he was helpless not to reach up for Fenris's chest, as Fenris pushed his trousers off his hips and bared his own cock (mercifully unmarked, Elwyn was relieved to see). Fenris's body lifted smoothly out of his reach, though, as he rose back on his knees to strip the rest of the way out of his clothes, and when he fell over Elwyn again he grabbed both Elwyn's wrists and pinned them to the bed, beside his shoulders, as they kissed. That in itself startled a moan out of him, to be buried in Fenris's mouth, that mingled both fresh arousal and frustration into one.

He bore it while Fenris stretched out more fully on top of him, pressing him down, driven to distraction by Fenris's knee planted between his thighs and the tease of his own cock sliding along the flat of Fenris's belly, of Fenris's cock rubbed against his hip. Soon, though, his hands were flexing restlessly in Fenris's grip, half-mad with having him so near and being denied. After a few more moments of writhing, shifting, moving in the soft wetness of their joined mouths, he gasped his way back to where he could just look in Fenris's eyes.

" _Please,_ " he begged, voice cracking on it: entirely shameless at this point, nothing but the need. "Please, will you let me touch you?"

It was an honest question, for all its desperation, and Fenris's eyes widened at it -- and then narrowed a bit, fixing him with a curiously stern look. Before Elwyn could have asked if he'd misstepped, though, taken it back or apologized, the moment broke. Fenris released his hands, drawing himself back up just slightly to lift his weight from them and then rest it on his elbows, to either side, instead. Elwyn clasped the back of Fenris's neck first, to draw him down and pour his own gratitude into a renewed kiss, and then slid his hands down Fenris's shoulders and back, up again along his hips and sides and chest. He thought he felt Fenris shiver against him, at the slow deliberateness of his exploration, but if so Fenris only arched to allow it, answering Elwyn's mouth hungrily as his fingers found and tangled in the sprawling braids of Elwyn's hair.

They twined together, rolled against each other, heat and want building with the friction between their bodies. Fenris slid a hand down Elwyn's side, brushing over his hip and then palming his cock, and Elwyn gasped his way out of the kiss again, his head falling back as his hips hitched up without his intent. He spread his thighs, bracing his feet on the mattress to pull up his knees a bit, fitting Fenris more deeply between them. The heat of Fenris's hand was devastating, the knowing of it for what it was even more so. His hands shook on Fenris's back, breath hot and fast and voiced where it stirred Fenris's hair, as Fenris leaned his head in to Elwyn's shoulder.

"I want you in me," he managed to gasp, when he could almost collect his breath, mouth pressed close to the point of Fenris's ear. "I want you to fuck me. Do you -- "

" _Yes,_ " Fenris growled at the base of his throat, cutting him off, and his hips jutted against Elwyn's inner thigh hard enough to steal Elwyn's breath from him twice over. He was gratifyingly stone-hard against Elwyn's flesh, dragging more wetness along his skin. "What... do you have?"

Elwyn could have slicked them both with magic, probably, but in the moment he wanted neither to trust his concentration nor even less to suggest the idea to Fenris. He struggled up on his elbows instead, casting his gaze and mind around desperately. "The -- wardrobe? There's a jar of oil -- probably good enough -- "

Fenris climbed off him and slipped out of the bed, which Elwyn bore with what he felt to be heroic courage, under the circumstances. Fenris was pulling the wardrobe open and rummaging in it in an instant, turning back with the oil in hand only seconds later, and even facing down a pack of blood mages Elwyn had never been more grateful for his grace and speed. He sat up to reach out to Fenris as he returned to the bed and welcome him back in, kissing him heatedly even as he was taking the jar. He only broke away to lie back once he had opened it, tugging Fenris by the waist to prop up over him with knees planted inside the sprawl of his thighs, and plunged in his fingers for a generous coating before raising up his hips and moving his hand underneath. He pushed his fingers into the cleft of his arse and then inside himself with frictionless slickness, but nonetheless not without difficulty; he had to let out a long, slow breath, eyes fluttering closed for a moment, to convince his body to understand again how it needed to relax and change to fit to the intrusion. When he had finally managed to seat them, however, he began to find the trick of it again, and adjust himself by degrees, enough to let him pump them a few slow times in and out and spread the slick. He opened his eyes again to find Fenris staring down at him -- the spread of his thighs, his fingers plunged into himself below, his cock lying thick on his lower belly above -- with a kind of stunned awe that made Elwyn's slightly softened prick throb almost painfully hard again at once.

He resisted a second's mischievous impulse to linger and make a better show of it -- some other time, perhaps, an idea that thrilled him completely. Right now, though, his need was too urgent. He only eased his fingers back out as soon as he was ready, and tipped another splash of oil into his palm, before closing and dropping aside the jar. Sliding one trembling hand around behind the nape of Fenris's neck to bring him closer, he wrapped his slick other around Fenris's prick in kind, and new heat overwhelmed him both at the feel of its warm weight in his grasp, and the way Fenris's head fell forward and breath heaved, a low sound caught in his chest. Elwyn stroked him slowly, lingering more than he needed to just to spread the oil, squeezing his palm down to Fenris's tip and then starting again at the root. With Fenris above him and shuddering with his touch, he couldn't help but entertain a moment's dizzy thought of just driving ahead, of seeing Fenris spill his seed and pleasure onto him, marking him... again, too many wants at war, but his course was set. He released Fenris's cock only with greatest reluctance -- and the way Fenris's bared teeth gritted at the loss, too, was gratifying beyond measure -- and lifted his knees toward his chest, gripping one thigh to draw them up higher. A second later Fenris was shifting his weight backward to move his bracing arms, gathering them under the crooks of Elwyn's knees to press his legs forward further still, as he brought his own spread knees forward under him for leverage. Elwyn clasped both legs around him, hefting up his shoulders at the same time to reach for Fenris's prick again, and Fenris shifted onto one arm to join him in guiding his length to where Elwyn had begged for it. Fenris's certain confidence in the workings of the act, for a man who had not wished to be touched since slavery and remembered nothing before it, was not something Elwyn found he wanted to consider at all.

They pressed the tip of Fenris's cock to him, and into him, and then Elwyn was falling back and letting Fenris finish the rest, his head arching back and throat working around a breathless rattle of sound. He was furrowed hotly open, an inch at a time, Fenris's breath audible and shaking as his prick drove into Elwyn, Elwyn clutching and aching around it. It seemed to take him both a very long time and too short of one to slide inside fully, his hips coming to rest pressed up tightly against Elwyn's rear. In the instant that they did, the intrusion inside Elwyn struck such a flare of blinding pleasure deep within him that it sent sparks along all his nerves, making him hitch shocked breath and paw for Fenris's thighs, as if to pull them in tighter still.

Fenris braced both hands again, leaned down close over Elwyn from above with Elwyn's legs pressed around his arms, and began to move: first in a maddeningly slow slide half out again, and then driving back in to sheath himself fully. The end of his thrust touched again on that deep place where the most intense pleasure could be found, and it seared Elwyn like a brand. His chest heaved on a breathy sound, cock throbbing, and he tried with what leverage he had to arch himself against Fenris's next stroke, to draw him even deeper. He was dimly aware that it seemed Fenris pushed harder too in answer, snapping his hips a bit to punctuate the thrust, and the result was an eye-watering perfection that Elwyn immediately craved more of with an addict's singular focus. As Fenris began to pump his hips in earnest, his oiled shaft finding a rhythm in Elwyn like a piston's, Elwyn ground his hips forward as best he could to answer every crest. He had no breath even to beg, only to arch and strive for every bit of Fenris he could hold.

As they moved together, Fenris's body pressed closer down by degrees as he drove for ever deeper, Elwyn's legs pushing up into an even tighter fold. Elwyn cracked his eyes open at last only to be struck through by the sight of Fenris's face so washed in pleasure: his eyes closed, lips parted and panting, his brows knitted in a much sweeter twin of pain. It was impossible to bear it and do nothing. He released Fenris's thigh to grip the back of Fenris's neck again, drawing him down into a clumsy wet mess of a kiss, as Fenris worked in him and he gave back what he could. Fenris lingered in it for a moment, lips trembling palpably against Elwyn's and tongue sliding against his, before he broke away gasping and could only seem to focus on his breath. Their foreheads pressed together instead, and Elwyn gulped his own air and let his eyes stay closed, just sinking into the euphoria of everything he could feel: Fenris close over him, fucking him for all he was worth, feeling what it was to have Fenris clasped in his hands and Fenris's cock buried all the way in him time and again. Things he had honestly never even felt he had the right to imagine, now real and here and his.

Before long his slick hand was stealing to his prick, unable to stand another second without touching himself. He stroked himself a few restless times, heat coiling inexorably tight low in his belly and bollocks, and then released and pulled his hand away when a point of no return seemed to draw too near, breathing through the ache of the denial before starting over again a moment later. He wouldn't last long now, he knew, but he wished he could; what he wanted even more than to come was to stay in this moment endlessly, pinned under Fenris, barely able to draw breath, splayed open and run with sweat and ruined, and his whole body wracked and trembling with exertion and the most exquisitely overpowering pleasure of his life. He wanted only this, like he had never wanted anything, or known he could. He didn't know how he would be able to do anything else, from now on.

But it couldn't last, in the end. He worked his hand over his cock one last time, and this time there was no stopping; Fenris pounded into him now with all merciless abandon and on one, two, three quick bursts of unendurable sensation from his cock as deep as it could go, Elwyn's ability to hold back shattered and desperation roared through him in an undammed flood. He shouted without enough breath to make much sound, and jerked his hand in a sudden swift frenzy of strokes -- and finally surged under Fenris and climaxed with enough force to tear the world away from him, blanking all thought and awareness into a perfect, blissful nothing.

Elwyn collapsed back into himself shaking with his heaving gasps, striped with seed all the way up to his chest, and with Fenris working in him with a rattle-breathed, wild urgency that slapped his hips almost up from the bed with every stroke. So soon and sensitive after coming, he could scarcely stand the intensity of it, and focused on breathing his way through, doing what he could bear to shift and squeeze around Fenris and help him take the last of what he needed. It didn't take much, in the end: in only a few more seconds Fenris was tearing out a low rumbling growl that rose to something like a roar, and in one last riot of thrusts he was coming inside Elwyn, the whole line of his form shaking and strained, his cock pulsing and spilling warmth at its deepest and most intimate press.

Then they were both still for a moment: panting in ragged syncopation, Elwyn loose and boneless in his sprawl in the sheets, Fenris hovering on his shaking arms and unmoving. Finally, Fenris stirred enough to free one hand and bring it between them to help ease his cock loose. He was as gentle as he could be, and it was softened enough to slip out with no real effort, but Elwyn still flinched a bit. Then Fenris pushed himself upward with an apparently heroic effort, first untangling himself from Elwyn's legs and then tumbling onto his side on the mattress beside Elwyn, with such uncharacteristic clumsiness that Elwyn could only smile around his still-heavy breath. At the same time, he let his own legs first sag into a crossed jumble on the bed, and then stretched them out carefully, wincing even harder now at his protesting thighs and knees. He was going to feel every inch of tonight every time he took a step, come the morning, in all kinds of places.

It wasn't really an unpleasant thought, though. How many years had it been since he'd last passed a day feeling ragged and sore and thoroughly well-fucked, reminded what he'd been up to every time he shifted his weight? And surely never before to anything like this degree -- nor with as much warm quiet joy embedded in the memory, the knowledge of what exactly he'd had.

He rolled onto his side as well, facing Fenris, and settled in beside him with another curiously satisfying wince. Fenris's eyes were already closed, his breathing slowing, and Elwyn almost began to reach for him... but he thought of how Fenris had avoided his touch at first, had hesitated to allow it, and in the end decided against it, hoping with a prickle of guilt that he hadn't demanded too much before as well. Instead, he only nestled as close as he could without touching, enough to feel Fenris's breath and the way the mattress dipped under his weight, and reached up with his cleaner hand to Fenris's face, mostly free of the markings, to trace his fingertips with deep tenderness just down the line of Fenris's cheek. Fenris's eyelids flickered, and he turned his head just slightly into the touch, his mouth pressing soft against Elwyn's fingers for a moment before relaxing away again.

Elwyn drew back his hand a moment later, and only watched him until his own eyes slid shut, without his noticing.

_I think I'm in love with him,_ was his last coherent thought before sinking into sleep, and it carried with it a rush of gladness that hurt in its intensity. Whatever else might happen, it was good to love, to know himself still able, beyond what he was needed for and owed. He followed that fragile peace down at last, and into darkness.

\---

Elwyn woke up disoriented, blinking up at the ceiling and puzzled by the firelight he could see it by; he couldn't see the candle-mark on his desk, but judging by how he felt and the shadows the light pushed back, it was still some time before dawn. Memory settled happily back into him almost at once, though, and he rolled back toward Fenris -- and found himself alone in the bed instead, the sheets rucked aside and pillow empty.

He pushed himself up at that, frowning, to look around the room. He found Fenris instead standing up, fully dressed again, and leaning on the mantel over the waning fire, staring toward and past it. The sight squeezed Elwyn's heart at once into his throat, and he sat up, ignoring the throb in his legs and inside him. All of a sudden all he could think was a hundred thoughts at once of how much he had asked, demanded, wanted -- every way he might have pushed, every second he hadn't been careful enough and might have missed so much --

"Was it that bad?" he asked into the silence; he was quite sure Fenris knew he was awake, but hadn't turned to look at him, which only twisted in his gut harder. He meant to say it lightly, to try to make it a joke, but it came out quite small instead. Fenris, though, seemed startled by the question -- enough at least to look over at him, though almost as quickly away. His expression was distant and carefully still, and there was nothing in it that brought Elwyn any comfort.

"No, it was fine," Fenris said, offhandedly as though Elwyn had distracted him from some more important train of thought. Elwyn couldn't hide his expression at that in the slightest, and when Fenris glanced at him again it caught him up short, bringing him to fully face Elwyn and softening the mask of his face into regret. "No. I'm sorry, I don't mean -- that is insufficient. It was... honestly better than anything I could have dreamed."

"Then what's wrong?" Elwyn asked, his voice still soft. He was quite sure he did not mistake the flicker of pain in Fenris's eyes before he looked away again.

"I thought I was -- " Fenris started, and then cut himself off, pressing his lips together for a moment before starting over. "I didn't -- expect..." He trailed off again into a longer silence, which Elwyn waited through in spinning agony. Fenris sighed at last, rubbing his palm over his eyes and forehead. "I began to... remember things. During... Fragments of -- what I think may have been my past before. Before any of this." He drew a hand down in a sharp line, next to the tracings of lyrium on his other arm. "...Among other things. I don't know what it means -- I don't even know if it was real -- but... I can't..." He pressed his mouth shut again, dropped his head forward in the pause. "I wasn't prepared for this. Any of this. I _wanted_ to be, but... I can't do this."

Every halting sentence hit Elwyn like a string of mining charges: one blast after another, distant and in the deep. He tried to take a slow breath, when it seemed like Fenris had stopped, and it shook. "I'm not sure I understand," he said after a moment, his voice faint even to himself. "Are you -- all right? Is there anything -- "

"I'm _fine_ \-- I just -- " Fenris, to his growing numb alarm, was shaking his head and actually taking a step backward, as if retreating from him and the suggestion. He seemed to gather himself after a moment's pause, though, breathing deeply, and finally looked back at Elwyn with a candid unhappiness that hurt so badly and unexpectedly it punched all the air out of him to see. "I'm sorry. But I think this should be the end of this."

And that, at least, could not have been clearer.

Elwyn felt himself frozen: every muscle in him tight and still, his face a numb blank. What was going on inside him was nothing he could even begin to categorize yet. It felt like it took him a very long time to be able to draw breath at all, let alone to be able to speak.

"Oh," he said, at last. His voice sounded calm to him but very distant, and entirely foreign. "I see. If that's what you need... I..." The breath began to shake under the words there, though, alarmingly, and he stopped, closing his eyes briefly.

"Please don't look like that," Fenris said, sounding desperately unhappy. When he opened his eyes he saw only more of the same in Fenris's face, and dropped his gaze at once. "I never meant for it to happen this way."

"I'm sorry," Elwyn said -- almost by rote, not entirely sure if he could have quantified what he was apologizing for or why. When he spoke again, nothing about it was anywhere near steady any longer. "Will you just tell me... Is it -- me? Is it that I'm -- "

But that seemed to make Fenris stand firmer, his brow creasing and gaze steadying, and he cut Elwyn off before he could continue. "No. It isn't that. The last thing I want is for you to think that's what this is about -- to be another stick you beat yourself with. Please do me the courtesy of believing me." Elwyn could summon no response to that, and after a long moment Fenris sighed again, misery stealing back into his features. "If there's a fault here, it lies in me, not in you. I'm -- in no condition to be with someone else like this. There isn't anything of me that I can offer you, or anyone."

"I don't think that's true," Elwyn said: too soft to be a genuine argument, but there all the same. "I -- "

But he stopped there, suddenly, appalled at what he realized he was about to say: to _confess_ himself, as though that were what the moment needed, as though that were fair to bring into this at all. He snapped his mouth shut abruptly on the words, recoiling from them. He said nothing instead, only sitting rigid and staring at nothing below the line of Fenris's gaze, for long enough that at last it was Fenris who spoke again.

"I wish it weren't. I wish many things were different." His voice was only soft now, regretful, and like nothing so much as the relentless plunging of a knife, in and in again. "Although... I want you to know that my coming here tonight is not among them. I don't regret this, and I hope you don't either. I wanted this. And having it was -- beyond all compare." He hesitated a moment, perhaps struggling, and then his shoulders dropped at the corner of Elwyn's vision: a surrender, at last. "I'm sorry, Hawke."

"So am I," Elwyn said, with what felt like nothing left in his voice at all. But Fenris was gone, leaving him alone in the shadows of the bed, before he could even try to explain for what.

\---

He lay back down again after a time, but didn't sleep: only stared up at the ceiling while he let the fire die back down, not thinking much of anything, not ready to truly feel anything that he was feeling. Eventually, closer to dawn, he got up entirely, and busied himself with gathering and using what he needed to clean himself up, grimly amused at the pointlessness of having troubled with a bath before all this. When he finally felt himself satisfactory, he dressed and went down to the library, sitting on a sofa for over an hour with a book across his knees he was not reading, Mugwort curled up more sensibly asleep at his feet. Then entirely too early, Orana bustled in with wood-polish and rags, and nearly shrieked her surprise at the sight of him; they apologized to each other too many times, and he absented himself to let her recover. Poor woman -- she seemed to feel safe and even confident in attending to her work, but in all else she was still frightened even of her own shadow. He couldn't blame her a bit, for that matter, although it was hard to imagine Fenris ever having been...

But he let the habitual run of those thoughts trail away, shutting his eyes back in the safety of his bedroom and breathing through the ache.

Most of the day he spent to himself, and seeking out any possible distraction: reckoning with ledgers and unanswered letters, reviewing intelligence and plans of action, thinking determinedly of anything but the matter closest to home. By evening, though, he could no longer bear to look at a sheaf of papers, and dressed for the lingering chill in the air, slipping out into the streets. Varric had sent a message the day before, wanting to speak with him, and he made his way toward the Hanged Man, with a disguised staff at hand just in case. Whatever it was, it would be something else to think about, at least for a little while longer.

He found Varric sprawled comfortably at a table in the main taproom, rather than in his own rented rooms, and of course entertaining a crowd of other drinkers with some manner of wild fabrication. He shooed them gently off when he saw Elwyn, though, leaning forward over the table with a renewed smile. "And there he is in the flesh. Evening, Hawke."

"Hello, Varric," Elwyn said, answering the smile with a ghost of his own as he came round the table, and lowered his hood. "You wanted to see me?"

"Yeah, have a seat." Varric seemed to look at him a little closer as he sat down, though, and frowned, pausing in whatever chain of thought he'd been about to follow. "Everything all right? You don't look so good."

"Yes, fine. I only didn't sleep well. Thank you for your concern." He made more of a business of settling himself and propping his staff beside the table than necessary, in the hopes it might better disguise his face for a moment, before trying for a stronger smile in Varric's direction. "And for pointing out how terrible I look, of course."

"Well, how would you know, otherwise?" Varric's amusement was thin, though, and in a moment it had slipped away, leaving him frowning again in that narrow way Elwyn didn't much care for. "...You know, I notice I haven't seen much of the angsty Tevinter elf around lately, either. Suppose _he's_ all right?"

Elwyn tried not to hesitate for long. "I... believe so, yes." He didn't have much hope that the careful neutrality of his voice would fool Varric, but he had to at least put in the effort. "I think he's just been preoccupied."

Varric only looked at him a moment before saying "Hmm," to that. "He's not the only one," was his only other remark, and Elwyn couldn't think of much to say to it while Varric took a sip off his pint, in apparent thought. Finally he set the mug down, and rested both hands on the table, with a sigh. "I... look, Hawke. Probably it's none of my business, but as a friend, I feel like I need to say something. I want you to know, I'm not trying to give you a hard time -- I actually think it's pretty sweet, the crush you've got on him."

Elwyn, who had been in the middle of a forming frown, froze all at once. Even as Varric went on, he was barely even able to follow it -- too torn between bleakly amused horror at what conversation Varric was clearly trying to have with him, and wondering with a stone in his gut if _everyone_ knew. Had he been able to hide it from no one, after all? He'd suspected Isabela might be trying to goad him a bit, casting him smirks after every ostentatious flirt in Fenris's direction, but he'd never been sure. Her too, then? All of them? Had he really been so utterly transparent, when he'd thought he was being careful? It was _almost_ possible for it to be funny.

"I even think he likes you too," Varric was continuing, though -- apparently oblivious to all that was going on within him now, at least. "I mean, hard as it is to say if he likes anything. And I think if anybody deserves some happiness in his life, it's you. But..." He sighed again, but while Elwyn struggled to form his thoughts into line at last, he didn't quite manage to do it before the end of Varric's pause. "I'm just saying... there's a lot going on there. You know as well as I do he's dealing with way too much for anybody. And I know how you tend to go all in on things -- and people, too." Elwyn opened his mouth, and Varric raised his hands, cutting him off for the moment. "I know, I'm out of line. Feel free to ignore me. But you're my friend. I just don't want to see -- "

"Varric," Elwyn finally got out, and managed after all this time to make it firm enough to stop him. "You don't have to... well. The moment has passed, is what I mean to say." Varric only looked at him, plainly uncomprehending, and Elwyn formed his mouth into something not entirely unlike a smile, and looked away. "...It's over. All of that. Is over."

"Oh," Varric said, after a moment's pause, but he was frowning deeper than ever. After looking into Elwyn's quiet expression for a moment, though, his brow suddenly cleared, eyebrows raising -- and then he was the one frozen. And then that broke too, and Varric was sitting back in his chair, letting out a long gusty breath. " _Oh._ ...Ah, shit. Well, there's my impeccable timing for you."

Elwyn's mouth twisted, though with no real conviction. "I do appreciate the thought," he said, quietly.

Varric heaved another sigh, and then gave him a sorry look that was difficult to meet. "Well, my friend," he said, after another moment's pause, "I'm thinking you could use a drink."

It actually managed to surprise Elwyn into a small wan chuckle. "At least, yes."

"Sit tight, then. I'm buying." Varric pushed up to his feet, clapping a companionable hand on Elwyn's shoulder as he walked around him. Elwyn smiled a bit in his direction, although with his head tilted down toward the floor. "And then we can talk about why I _actually_ wanted to see you, besides just to jam my foot in my mouth. Who knows -- maybe this'll cheer you up." Elwyn glanced at him, and Varric shot him a smile of his own that was now curiously hard around the edges. "Someone's back in town."

\---

In the end, it was right on the heels of the ugly close of their business with Bartrand that there came more bad news about the Qunari, and if there was anything fortunate about any of that at all, it was that Elwyn was left with no real time to spare to think about what had happened. Or what might happen still, for that matter. As days went by, Fenris failed to reappear from his absence, and now Elwyn's fears no longer seemed so absurd. For all that it lingered in his mind with stubborn vividity, often at the worst moments, what they'd had between them so briefly seemed already like an impossible dream: nothing that could have really happened at all. His friendship with Fenris was what was real to him, what had existed so much longer, and far more than what he'd lost, what gnawed at him now was what he might have yet to lose. If Fenris stayed away -- if he left, even, deciding Kirkwall was no longer for him and to seek better fortunes elsewhere... that would be a blow Elwyn wasn't sure he knew how to bear. He already missed Fenris, absurdly much: his company, his dry wit, his determination and insight, his flashes of unsentimental compassion.

But he left Fenris his space, again -- in spite of his own private agonies of uncertainty. Until the night when desperation drove him to only those he could gather fastest, those closest to his door; when he stumbled back into the front foyer of the ruined mansion at nearly a run, and called out-of-breath up to Fenris, frowning down from where he'd come to the top of the stairs: "Please come. It's my mother."

\---

He had no idea how long it had been since Gamlen had left, and barely remembered coming upstairs after. Nor had he any idea how long ago Bodahn had come in, uncharacteristically silent, with a cup and saucer of tea and a look of unendurable kindness; only that the tea sat stone-cold on his desk now, and he likewise on the side of the bed, elbows on his knees, his head dangling toward them. All the strength to move had deserted him, even to lift himself up. He felt that he would grow roots here, and stay still for good.

The sounds of footsteps on the stairs didn't stir him, but the shape of Fenris in the doorway in the periphery of his vision, and the sound of Fenris's voice, did manage to churn one muddy ripple of surprise in the depths. "I can't say I know what to say, but I'm here," Fenris said, quietly. "If you want company at all."

"Thank you," Elwyn said, without raising his eyes from his interlaced hands. There wasn't much to his voice, but it was even. "You didn't have to come. But I'm grateful."

That seemed to let Fenris come into the room at last, and he crossed to the bed and sat on its edge beside Elwyn. The sink of his weight, the nearness of his familiar presence, ran a single unwelcome crack up the shell of Elwyn's numbness, right through the center of his gut and chest. He closed his eyes against it.

"It's my fault, isn't it?" he asked, at length. His voice was no less simply quiet and thoughtful to a casual ear. Fenris was looking at the side of his face, he was aware, but he did not look back.

"I can't answer that." The bed shifted under them as Fenris sat back, turned more toward him and to face him. "If you need absolution, it can't come from me. I wish it could; but that's not my place."

Elwyn nodded, slowly, his eyes fixed again down on his hands. Under the force of his stare their familiar shapes began to look alien to him, even monstrous, after not very long at all. Everything was so fragile. It could be distorted beyond recognition so easily.

"I didn't need to ask," he said. "I know the answer. Of course it is. It all is. It always has been." The words started to come faster the more of them he said -- too fast, finally, and their steadiness going atilt by degrees. "Bethany died before we were even fully out of Lothering. I couldn't protect her, even when I was sworn to. I tried to keep Carver from the same fate and he hates me for it, he's as good as lost to me. And now Mother. To die like that -- " He sealed a hand over his mouth as his voice began to break completely, and left it there a moment, his deep breath hissing against his palm, before taking it away an inch to speak again. "A _grotesquerie_ at the hands of a monster, and just -- random chance -- a wrong glance at the wrong time in the street -- What am I to make of it? What else am I to think? It's what I deserve! Isn't it? Could it be clearer this is my punishment -- this is what my freedom costs! All of them gone in front of me, and I could do _nothing_! _This is what I've earned!_ "

His voice had been rising all the while, and he broke it off when he realized he was nearly shouting, burying it and his face all in his cupped hands. Fenris was silent for a moment; all that Elwyn could hear was the muffle of his own ragged breathing, covering over the crackle of the fire.

"Was it what she deserved, then?" Fenris asked, at last. The bluntness of it jerked Elwyn's head up from his hands, and he found Fenris's expression where it was trained on him neutral, candid, not at all unkind. "It doesn't work that way. You can't be at the center of everything, even what happens to others beyond your control. Sometimes random chance is just that."

"And I was supposed to stop it," Elwyn said, choked and forced, his head dropping forward again. "That was my task. I can only imagine how -- _disappointed_ my father must be -- to have left them in my care, and I cared for none of them. I let all of them come to so much harm, and I didn't stop it."

"You tried," Fenris said, very softly. "You've hardly done anything but try."

Elwyn could only make a choked sound deep in his chest, and shake his head. They sat in silence for another long moment, the firelight casting both of them in swaths of light and shadow.

"I should go to the Circle," Elwyn said, out of it, his voice almost something like calm again. "Shouldn't I? I should turn myself in. Let them put me in a cell and keep me away from ordinary people I could harm. Why not?" His shoulders heaved with a shaking breath. "I don't have anyone left to take care of. All the reasons I had for staying free are gone. It's too late, but it's the least I can do. It'd probably be for the best."

"I would be very unhappy to see that happen." Elwyn glanced up with only his eyes, but Fenris's face betrayed nothing more than his low, measured voice had. "As would a great many other people."

"I think you'd find at least as many who disagreed." The bitterness in his own voice only exhausted him now, though, and he sighed and passed a trembling hand over his eyes. "...It doesn't matter, anyway. I know I won't. Still too much of a coward. I can scream and rail all I like, but that's the truth of it: I'm still that boy who knows the price of his actions, but keeps choosing the hypocrite's way. I suppose I always will be." He dropped his hand away, across his lap, staring miserably down at it. "What a terrible bit of clarity -- to spend some two decades trying to carve a better self, and when the dust clears, to see myself no different than when I started."

Fenris seemed to have nothing to say to that, and they sat together for another lengthy pause. Finally, Elwyn scrubbed his face with both hands, and mustered the strength somehow to pull himself up a bit, just enough to feel less that he was trying to fold in on himself and disappear.

"I'm... indulging myself, I'm afraid," he said, at last, and even made a vague attempt at a weak, watery false smile. "I apologize. You never asked for this."

Fenris shrugged a bit, the twist in his lips no larger but maybe a touch more true. "I came here, didn't I?"

Elwyn looked down, his mouth still in that meaningless shape. "You did. And I appreciate it.." He drew a slow breath, making the effort to raise his head again, if only to look out at the nothingness of the wall. "You're right, of course -- she deserves more than for me to make her death about myself. I only... can't stand to think of any other part of it, yet. ...It's too much to take."

"That's more than understandable," Fenris said. His voice was gentler than Elwyn thought he'd ever heard it. It stung inside his chest -- brought on a clench of feeling he could scarcely even identify. It tore words out of him, rushing and stumbling over themselves, before he knew what he would say.

"Will you stay? Here. Tonight. Please." Fenris looked at him again, and even with no more than a glimpse of his expression Elwyn squeezed his eyes shut, wincing away from it. "Not like... just -- well, I suppose I have a spare room now." He uttered a wild, jagged laugh. "Or... you can have the bed, I'll sleep in the library. It doesn't matter. Just... it's still so cold, and I hate thinking of you alone there with the place falling down around you. I just... can't..."

But he seemed to run out his course there, and just dwindled into silence: each of the last few words quieter and more beaten than the one before, until there were none left at all. They both sat still a moment, with that fallen between them, and said nothing.

"I don't think that would be a good idea," Fenris said, at the end of it. His voice was still not unkind, but more neutral than Elwyn might, selfishly, have hoped. He only nodded, though, not daring yet to open his eyes.

"No. Of course." He took another shaky breath. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked."

"It's all right." And no, it wasn't -- but what would be the point of saying so, if Fenris wanted to pretend? There was another pause, and then Fenris sighed a bit himself, shifting a bit as if to go -- of course. Elwyn hadn't meant to say it, but he still should have bitten his tongue. He should have known better, as about so many things.

"I'm sorry," was all Fenris said, though, and stayed where he was at least for now. Elwyn opened his mouth to object, but Fenris shook his head. "For... making myself so scarce, I mean. I wish I had been closer to hand in all this. ...I only thought you might not wish to see me."

"I always want to see you," Elwyn said, somehow again without catching himself before it was out. It was hard to regret it once it was, though. "You're my friend."

Fenris seemed to hesitate at that, and then inclined his head, the firelight burying much of his face in shadow. "I will do my best to be more present, then. When I can." He moved again, and this time did stand up fully to his feet. "For now, though, you should rest."

Elwyn nodded, still not quite looking up to meet his eyes. "Most likely." He didn't really want to sleep -- didn't want to face what he might find there, like a child frightened of being left in the dark -- but he was far too tired to argue with the idea, either. "Thank you again, Fenris."

Fenris nodded back and headed for the door, and Elwyn lay over on his side before Fenris had even fully gone, stretching out over the bed and closing his eyes. He really was exhausted; the whole night was sinking in over him with a terrible weight, pressing him out of the world and down into darkness. Whether he wanted it or not, he would be soon asleep. Maybe he would be lucky beyond all reason, and there would be nothing there to see at all.

He remembered nothing after that later, so he supposed he had indeed fallen asleep almost as soon as his head rested on the pillow. And that Bodahn must have come in again to check on him later, or perhaps Orana, or even Sandal. How else, after all, would he have been settled more comfortably into the bed even after he had gone to sleep; or how would the blanket that he had neglected have been pulled up over him, as by some gentle, protecting hands?


	3. Chapter 3

Elwyn did his best to give Fenris all the space he could, but in truth it was only a few days before he couldn't stay away any longer. Over the years, the ruined front doors of the mansion had become far too choked with vines and rubble and rubbish from passers-by to be navigated, and he let himself in through the kitchen entrance and the wreckage of the servants' quarters as was by now all of their custom, letting Fenris hear his steps in the hall and on the stairs by way of announcement. Indeed, when he came to the bedroom door, Fenris was already looking up at him expectantly from the padded bench on the far side of the fire, whichever book he was halfway through now lying abandoned on his knees. Elwyn had long since ceased to be able to keep track of what Fenris was reading. Ever since he had first begun stumbling through his letters with Elwyn's aid, sounding out words from the page aloud with a determination that poorly masked the frustration and wounded dignity woven inside it, he had sought out new tomes with a voraciousness that seemed born as much out of spite as pleasure. Although could Elwyn say he'd ever seen all that much distance between the two?

"Did Aveline send you to throw me out bodily, then?" Fenris said now, though, and not entirely without humor. It gave Elwyn pause in the doorway, and he found a small smile crossing his lips as he was coming more fully inside.

"If that was what she wanted, I think she could do it more easily herself." Fenris gave a small snort of acknowledgment at that, and closed the book to set it aside while he waved Elwyn to the neighboring chair. "Why? Have you offended her?"

"Only by loitering, as far as I'm aware." Elwyn raised his eyebrows, and Fenris settled his elbows across his knees, looking elsewhere. "She and Varric were by earlier -- attempting to hound me into taking real lodgings like an upstanding citizen, now that I have the option."

Elwyn considered that for a moment, watching what of Fenris's face he could see. "Is there a reason you wouldn't?" he asked, finally. Fenris glanced at him, with a look of hesitation in his eyes that was almost strong enough to be worry, and then looked down.

"I've been asking myself that same question," he said, and his shoulders shook once with something that wasn't really a laugh. He was still another moment, and then sat back, leaving his hands laced between his knees as he met Elwyn's eyes at last. "I think it's only... that it doesn't feel like anything has changed. Not really. I can't seem to convince myself, even though in my head I know the difference. ...I suppose that doesn't make much sense."

"I think it does," Elwyn said, quietly. "When you've run long enough, running becomes all you know. To _not_ have to run feels... unsafe. Precarious. More so even than when you knew you were hunted."

Fenris studied him for a long moment after that; but did the courtesy of not acknowledging the experience from which he spoke. "To an extent, I suppose," was all he said, instead. "The rest may be just stubbornness." Elwyn half-smiled, and after another moment, Fenris tilted his head, almost answering it. "If not to evict me -- then you came to check on me?"

Elwyn nodded, now looking away himself. There seemed to be no point in denying it, though. "I wanted to make sure you were all right. You were -- " -- so frightened, he had meant to finish that, but on consideration it didn't seem like a kindness to draw attention to the way Fenris's face had strained into wide-eyed whitened lines when Danarius had appeared at the top of the stairs, or the way he had nearly been able to feel Fenris trembling next to him before the fight truly broke loose. Nor any of the other things that might have torn from Fenris his balance: the spray of blood across his skin, the pain ripped out of his voice as Varania had been leaving, when he had asked her why. Any of what she had said.

"It was a lot at once," he said instead, and though it was a much weaker thing to say, it was at least a thin veil of safety he could offer. Fenris appeared to consider that, his gaze fixed on nothing as long moments passed.

"And yet, not as much as it seems like it should have been," he said, at last, looking up at Elwyn. "I found my sister; but that's a dead end after all. ...Though I'm glad she lives, in the end." His eyes dropped away again, a ghost of another not-quite-smile on his lips. "Thank you, for stopping me. I know I didn't appreciate it at the time. But you were right. I would have regretted killing her." Elwyn inclined his head in a nod, not sure what to say, and Fenris went on. "And Danarius is dead. I killed him. Something I craved for so long -- obsessed on. I imagined his death would be triumphant: a melodrama of retribution that would free me from everything I've suffered." He tipped his head forward, looking down further, at the floor. "But of course that was another story I told to comfort myself. In the moment, it was over in seconds, and I feel -- nothing. I washed his blood off my arm and it was like nothing had happened. It's just another day."

Elwyn nodded. "You could only kill the version of him that lived in the world, for now," he said, quietly. "The one that lives in your mind will take more work."

That seemed to startle Fenris's head up, his eyes wide for a second before they turned more thoughtful and downward. "Now that's a miserable thought," he said, with a bitter huff of a laugh. Elwyn half-smiled, turning his own head down.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"No, don't be. Most likely it needed to be said." Fenris sighed, and leaned back on the bench, weariness clear in the slope of his shoulders. "In this world, though, I don't really know what comes next. I suppose I'm a free man, but I have nothing to put that in context, to tell me what it means. No family, only shreds of a past I'm not sure I want. ...And now, not even an enemy."

"You have friends," Elwyn said, gently -- echoing what he'd tried to say in the Hanged Man, when Fenris hadn't been ready yet to listen. "Here and now, not from whatever came before. There are people who care about you, and want you to be a part of their lives." He paused a moment, and then laughed a little, low. "And who'll try to strongarm you into taking care of yourself, even when you don't want to."

That surprised Fenris into a bit of a laugh himself -- one that actually sounded more true. "I suppose that's so," he said, and lapsed into silence for a moment... and then raised his head to look at Elwyn, with a smile honest and beautiful enough to stop his breath. "I do value that. More than you may know."

Elwyn smiled back, quick and uncertain, even as he had to drop his eyes away. "I know it isn't everything. But... it's a start."

"It is," Fenris agreed. He appeared to dwell on that a moment, and when Elwyn risked looking in his eyes again, he met them now with only a small curve at his mouth. "And as my friend: what do you think I should do now?"

Elwyn looked at him wide-eyed for only a heartbeat's time, then shook his head. "I think that's up to you, at long last, and I wouldn't presume to intrude on it." He could see Fenris readying exasperation with him, and only gave another small smile at it, dropping his eyes again as he spoke first. "But if you want to know what I _hope_..." He took a small breath. "What I hope, entirely selfishly, is that you'll stay, and you'll still be a part of my life in whatever future may come. Because it would be much poorer without you in it."

They fell from that into silence: Fenris watching Elwyn's face with a still expression that was hard to interpret, and Elwyn meeting his eyes with a small touch of a smile on his lips. At last, it was Fenris who looked away this time -- although it might have been with a slight smile of his own, in answer.

"I'm glad to hear you say that," he said in a soft, curiously measured tone, "because I think that's what I hope for, as well." And, even as Elwyn's chest was lightening with the answer, he lifted his head, to show that same heart-squeezingly true smile again. "And what an unexpected pleasure, after all this time: to have anything to hope for at all."

\---

Something that Elwyn had come to suspect in the intervening years, although he had no way to test his theory, was that no one who had a title like the "Champion" of anything could actually remember much of the events that had earned it. He had only the dimmest recollections of the night of the Qunari attack, and those only in fragments: a sense of darkness split by flames' heat and smoke, punctuated by sounds of steel and shouting and running feet; the image of Merrill running to the rest of them, narrowly through the gap of the slamming alienage gates, calling out questions about what was happening; a placeless recollection of Anders -- for once in his life seeming able to focus on only the actual matter at hand -- joining him to work a more complex healing than he would've been able to manage by himself, on a huddled group of Lowtown refugees who'd been caught in a burning building, and his own rush of distracted gratitude. Even the much-touted battle with the Arishok seemed to him now only a disjointed series of his own fumblings. He had mostly just struggled to stay out of range, to keep from being pinned down hand-to-hand at all, and either blocked the best he could with his staff or desperately healed his own gashes when his efforts failed. Finally he had seen the opening that had let him grab with both hands the Arishok's fist round the haft of his axe, fallen low at the end of a downward swing, and use both his own twisting grasp and the added force of an explosive blast of magic to drive its central spike straight up into the Arishok's chest, running him through. According to Varric since, that moment had been the absolute jewel in the night's crown from a storyteller's perspective, and had practically done all the work for him of painting Elwyn as some roguish folk hero: the type who tricks the wicked wizard in a fairy story into transforming himself to an easily-swatted fly, or uses the giant's own too-heavy plate to bear him to his knees. Elwyn was glad Varric was pleased with the outcome, but rather bemused by that particular spin on an act of pure desperation -- born only of facing off against a massive horned giant bristling with steel, with a handful of spells he didn't dare use in the one hand, and a large stick in the other.

In any event, though, regardless of the truth at the heart of it all, the night had certainly made its mark. Particularly in the past few months, it felt like he had gone from being an occasional interested party in the affairs of the city to a central figure in its current struggles, sought after if not by the Knight-Commander to advise on some investigation, then by the First Enchanter to oppose some new restriction. It made for an exhausting schedule -- not least because of his increasing discomfort, with each passing day, with the one's rhetoric and policy, and the other's plainly growing outrage. He was coming to feel he would have preferred to stay out of it entirely, were it not for his new prominence, and how wholly it placed him at the mercy of Meredith's willingness to suffer the polite fictions about him.

But he tried, all the same, to keep making time for his companions in the city: to keep a sense of balance by absenting himself from politics now and then for a drink, or a talk, or to help with some concern. Dealing with Fenris's former master had been only the latest and most important of those endeavors, and a few weeks later he was back at the ruined mansion for a breath of peace before more work, both of them this time making the cheerful mistake of a few hands of Wicked Grace with Isabela. She was as thoroughly monstrous an opponent as ever, and though he wouldn't have liked to admit it, he was a little pleased to see that -- even after their conversation, after fighting over the business with Castillon -- she wasn't _entirely_ changed.

Eventually, though, she excused herself, citing a "trading opportunity" at the Rose that Elwyn was entirely content to know nothing more about. He probably needed to be on his way himself, at least soon, but he found that for the moment he was too comfortable lingering: sitting where he'd placed himself on the floor between Fenris's chair and the bench Isabela had left, legs stretched out and arm leaned on the makeshift card-table.

"Have you thought any more about your living arrangments?" he asked, presently, instead of getting up to go. Fenris glanced up at him from shuffling the deck away, and answered his smile.

"Not much, I'm afraid. I think my only excuse is that I'm still waiting to see if there's any purpose to taking a room, or if in a month's time the whole city will be burned down around our ears anyway."

Elwyn laughed a little, stretching out his arms to his laced fingers in front of him. "I wish I could say it wasn't a fair concern, but... I can't." He nodded toward the door, his expression sobering. "Did Isabela tell you about the agent of the Divine's we met the other night? From the sound of it, a new Exalted March on Kirkwall isn't off the table. Which is a dreadful new thing I didn't know I needed to be worried about."

Fenris tilted his head, considering. "Do you really feel outside intervention would be out of order?"

"Yes, if there's one thing I've always known to calm a situation right down, it's holy war," Elwyn said, drily. Fenris smiled his acknowledgment, and after a moment, Elwyn sighed, and pushed himself up onto Isabela's abandoned bench at last. "I just know that if this does all come to a head, in that way or any other, it won't be the people responsible who suffer most from it. Nor, for that matter, those like me, who have the means to defend ourselves. ...Unfortunately, the people responsible do not seem especially concerned about that."

"I don't think they often are." Fenris sat back, eyes on Elwyn all the while. "Have you seen any progress in easing the tensions?"

"None." Elwyn sighed, rubbing his face with both hands. "I'm not sure if I'm making things better or worse, frankly. I'm no politician."

Fenris smiled at that, with a sudden warmth that Elwyn found a bit flustering. "I'd rather have you in the middle of this mess than ten politicians. Though I can see how you might not agree."

Elwyn, caught off guard, could only blink a moment before managing an uneasy laugh. "Well... the last thing I ever want is ten politicians. But I'm not sure I'm the best alternative." Fenris raised his eyebrows, still smiling, and Elwyn answered it sheepishly. "I just fell into this, really. A couple of almost complete accidents, and somehow the most important people in the city are asking for my support. It doesn't really seem fair to the rest of the very clumsy refugees, who just didn't trip over the right thing."

"I'm less concerned with your qualifications than with your character," Fenris said, with an amusement that was curiously close to gentleness. "Regardless of how he got them, I'd just as soon see the man with the ears of the powerful be the one who worries over how war would affect the shipwrights and boot-blacks. Not to mention the one who chose to stop and run into every burning building along the way, _before_ he stumbled into turning back the entire Qunari invasion."

"I... think you take an overly generous view of my nature," Elwyn said after the moment it took him to recover speech, while struggling for his dignity against the heat blooming into his face. Fenris's smile spread fractionally, nearing a smirk, which did nothing to help.

"Do you? I don't." He paused there, though, appearing to think, and as the moment passed his smile slid away by degrees until it was entirely gone. The expresssion he turned back to Elwyn was sober, contemplative, maybe even beginning to be unhappy. "I've never been given the slightest cause to doubt you're a good man, Hawke. Which is all the more reason..." He hesitated again, and then sighed in answer to Elwyn's frown. "I've been thinking, lately, about how I owe you an apology."

Elwyn's frown deepened, although he tried to temper it with a bit of a laugh. "Not... to my knowledge, but go on."

Fenris half-smiled wanly at that, although it was lost just as soon. Still, what he said was the last thing Elwyn might have expected: "We've never talked about what happened between us three years ago."

It jolted Elwyn badly, and for seconds that probably weren't as long as they felt, he could only stare and not respond. "I thought you didn't want to," he said, finally, with a voice that sounded more uncertain than he'd hoped. Fenris looked down, away from him.

"You didn't think wrongly. But... I wish I'd spoken sooner, all the same." He was silent for a moment, and then took a breath to continue, although without ever raising his eyes to Elwyn's. "I let you think I wanted no more than what we'd had, because it was easier than the truth: I was _afraid_ of more. The memories that night stirred -- of one past I can't fully remember, and one that... I can -- they overwhelmed me. I was not brave enough to face them. Not yet." He did look up then, finally, and there was a depth of sorrow in his eyes that was nearly impossible to bear. "And... no; it was more than that. I felt -- broken. Unfinished, and unclean. For all that to be bearing on me, when I wanted to be thinking only of you -- "

Fenris took another breath, which might have been shaking slightly. "I felt... that you deserved better than anything I had to give. I felt that I could offer you nothing, without all of myself restored to me -- without being able to remember everything, and be entirely free. I was so certain that killing Danarius would be a miracle cure -- that it would let me escape him, finally, and somehow lead to my recovering my past in the bargain." He sighed, lacing his hands across his knees. "But being free of him will be more complicated than I ever imagined, it seems. It may be the work of my whole life to come. And from what I do know and recall of the man I was before him, now... that man is a stranger to me, and no one I will ever be again. Who he was, what he wanted, what he believed, are not what I am and do now, and I don't think that will change. I am -- unrecoverable. What I thought I lacked to be able to be with you will never come."

"For what it's worth," Elwyn began, and then had to stop to swallow when he found his voice dusty and thin. "...I never knew you, as you were before. The person I befriended, and -- desired... that was always who you are now. You have my respect and my admiration, as who you are. I never thought that needed to change."

Fenris glanced at him, and smiled, if only for fleeting seconds. "It's worth a great deal," he said, quietly. "Though I wish I had recognized it sooner." He stared at his hands, choosing his next words. "In fact, as long as I'm wishing things uselessly, I wish that I had understood then a great deal that I do now. I wish I had never left. That I had stayed, and told you more of what was the matter, and let you try to help -- which I knew you would want to do, and which also terrified me." He closed his eyes briefly, barely visible to Elwyn with his head turned down. "I wish I had known that, of all the things I feared, none of them could possibly be as bad as letting you go, when all I wanted was to keep you. And when I knew you wanted the same."

The silence stretched long again; but this time, Elwyn could think of nothing to say. He felt like he could barely even breathe, or risk making some sound or motion that would brush against the edge of the moment, and shatter it.

"But I didn't," Fenris said, finally, and lifted his head with an effort that seemed very great, to meet Elwyn's eyes again. "And I am sorry, Hawke. I only hope that you may be able to forgive me."

Elwyn could only struggle for a moment -- against a lack of breath, of voice, that felt like a physical weight against his chest. "There's nothing to forgive," he managed to say finally, and to his dim relief, his voice even sounded almost normal. "You owe me nothing. There's no wrong in not being ready for something, or being afraid. Or in not wanting it at all, for that matter, if... that had been how you felt." He took a difficult breath, and shook his head. "If anything -- _I'm_ sorry. I think... I didn't make anything easier for you. I was so fixed on what I wanted, I didn't stop to think enough on what it was to you. I was impatient, and I regret it."

"Impatient," Fenris repeated, with a small incredulous laugh that seemed to burst free, beyond what he could contain. "That's perhaps the last word I would think of to describe how you've been in all this. Tell me, do you consider mountains to wear down at an overly hasty rate?"

"Sometimes," Elwyn said, with all available dignity, though with a bit of a sheepish smile touching his mouth as well. After a moment's pause, though, he sighed, and lost it again. "I only mean that, in the moment, I didn't realize how much came tied to it for you. In -- my eagerness, I may have made things more difficult for you as well, even if I didn't mean to. You don't need to apologize to me for what was partly my doing."

Fenris appeared to consider that for a moment, seriously, and then inclined his head in what might have been acknowledgment. "Nevertheless, I hurt you," he said, though, voice quiet again. "That's not something I would ever have wanted to do, and I find it more difficult to excuse."

Elwyn opened his mouth to ready some new argument... but Fenris only continued to look at him, and at last he let it go, with a slight sigh. "Then... if that's what you need, you have my forgiveness. Of course. Long since."

"Thank you," Fenris said, with a small smile, but such a complexity of feeling around his eyes that Elwyn couldn't dare to look at it directly. He was caught in struggling, instead, to find his voice one more time -- to somehow force out of himself the question he was most afraid to ask, if only to do honor to everything Fenris had shown the courage to say.

"Do you -- still feel that way?" he finally managed to burst out, like an explosive charge, from his chest. Rough and taut beyond all breaking, but still somehow there. "That you would -- want us to be together?"

Fenris looked at him, and this time when their eyes caught, Elwyn could never have looked away. Every spark of flame he had ever seen there, every look that searched too deep, rolled together now and seeming magnified --

"With all that I am," Fenris said, low and with such feeling that it was not altogether steady. "It's been three years and I still remember your touch as though it were yesterday. Every time I look at you -- " He broke off there, breathing hard and deep, and fixed Elwyn with his eyes again. "Do you? Would you?"

"Always," Elwyn said, barely more than breath, stumbling into his words blind. "I never stopped, not once. I _tried_ \-- I told myself I had no right, if it wasn't what you wanted, I had to forget it, but I didn't, I couldn't. Eventually I gave up. I was so glad simply to still have you as my friend, and finally I decided that it was worth any price, even knowing every time I saw you that I loved you and it would never come to anything. I was willing to bear that, if it only meant not losing you."

He could see Fenris's eyes widen at that, and then the look come over his face that was softer and fiercer all at once. "Then I shall be at your side," he said, "for as long as you will it."

He was moving even as he finished saying it, and Elwyn found that he was too: standing toward each other, closing in a clumsy rush the space in front of the fire. For the first time in all these years, crossing the distance that they had left between them in this room as they talked, about matters dire or mild, and meeting in a place in the middle. They were both fully upright by the time they came together, and kissing without the slightest pause, Elwyn's arms around Fenris's neck and Fenris's tight around his waist. For as long as it had been, as fleeting when it had happened before, it still somehow felt like coming home, like sliding back into a place of belonging. The insistent heat of Fenris's mouth on his, the press of his body, the encircling of his arms, stopped all at once an ache felt so constantly, for so long, it had been quite nearly forgotten.

They slid apart naturally in a moment's pause, after a long wonderful time, and in that brief return to awareness of anything in the world outside them Elwyn was startled, and then dismayed, by sudden realization. "I know this is an absolutely horrible irony," he murmured, still hovering close, "but... I have to _go_." Fenris drew his head back slightly to blink at him, looking equal parts disbelieving and amused, and Elwyn winced into a smile as he followed suit, albeit with his arms still resting on Fenris's shoulders. Nothing was helped by the slight embarrassed pleasure of how the skin had reddened around Fenris's mouth, where Elwyn's beard had rubbed it. "It's... Meredith and Orsino are actually deigning to meet for once, and she asked me to act as arbitrator. It could be very important, and I'm already late, and I cannot tell you how very close I am to just forgetting the whole thing and letting them deal with it themselves for bloody once."

"But you won't," Fenris said, with no question in it at all, but no end of fondness either. Elwyn hesitated for long seconds, and then sighed, deeply.

"No. I won't."

Fenris chuckled, low and warm in his chest, and pressed another brief kiss to his mouth, though he pulled back again firmly when Elwyn tried helplessly to follow it. "You'll be at home tonight?"

"Of course." He took only a second's pause to wrestle with the slow dawning heat the question immediately produced. "I don't think it should even be long after sunset."

Fenris nodded, a bit of a smile still on his lips. "You waited for me almost six years; I think I can manage to wait for you a few more hours." Elwyn was surprised into a small, breathless laugh, and then Fenris was slipping backward, out of his arms again. "Go save Kirkwall, if it can be saved. I'll see you soon."

"It's all I'll be thinking of," Elwyn said, with all the feeling inside him let out into his voice; and he dared this time to cup the side of Fenris's jaw, leaning in for one last kiss of his own. Fenris leaned back into it, giving it back just as strongly; and after only a second or two, Elwyn had to release it again and fumble his way out of the room entirely, for fear of not being able to let go at all.

\---

As it happened, though, Elwyn's hopes for just how soon it might be were dashed; he let himself in at home resignedly, at long last, at an hour well advanced into the night. And sure enough, the sconces in the foyer had been dimmed, and there was no sign of any lingering visitor. It came as no surprise to see, but it was dejecting, all the same. Well... ah, well. He would find Fenris tomorrow, and make his profusest apologies.

In the meantime, he made his way into the front hall -- and then paused, at the sight of movement and shadow from the library. He crossed over to peer inside, and it was also with no particular surprise he found Orana on her knees with a bucket and brush just inside, scrubbing away at the floorboards. Elwyn cleared his throat, perhaps a bit pointedly but trying not to startle her, and had at least some success; she only jumped and yelped a little, before relaxing at the sight of him with a hand on her chest.

"My lord Hawke! You -- you surprised me." She sat back on her knees, covering the brush in her other hand as though fighting the urge to hide it behind her back. Elwyn smiled at her, leaning on the library doorway.

"I hope not too badly," he said, gently, and dropped his eyes to the bucket. "It's... a bit late for cleaning the floors, isn't it?"

"Yes, my lord," she said, with a slight guilty duck of her head, and brushed stray hair from her eyes. Even after three years, Elwyn still winced at her _my lord_ s, but it had been their best compromise when he had flatly refused to be called _Master_ , and the suggestion of calling him by name had plainly terrified her. If it was some comfort to her, he was resigned to let the matter be. "I'm so sorry. I know you've said you don't want me to clean past my hours."

"There's no need to apologize. I only worry that you'll overwork yourself." She shook her head, though, quickly, giving up and dropping the brush back in the bucket before climbing to her feet.

"I don't mind, my lord." Elwyn opened his mouth to argue with that, but Orana looked down, biting her lip. "It's just that... sometimes it's hard to quiet my mind, when I'm idle. Doing something helps."

It took Elwyn off guard a bit -- not only what she'd said, but her willingness to say anything about it at all. He could only blink at her for a moment, and then nodded slowly, considering. "I can understand that," he said, at last. "...Would it be better simply to work when you choose, and keep an accounting of your hours? There's no need for you to have a set schedule, now that I think of it."

That seemed to startle Orana in turn, and she raised wide eyes to him, hands twisting together unconsciously at her waist. "Oh. I..." She appeared to think for a moment, and then a very small, hesitant smile began to show across her lips. "I think that would... be very nice. Master Bodahn says the trader who sells spices from the north comes to market on Tuesday mornings, and I... I've only seen him once or twice, when I did the shopping early. But I would like to go more often. I've been trying to remember some more of Papa's old recipes, and... I like the smells. They're familiar."

Elwyn smiled, with a deeper warmth than ever as well as an edge of regret. _You could have just told me that,_ might have come to his lips to say, but no: of course he knew she couldn't have. "I feel the same way when there are Fereldan produce-sellers in Lowtown," he said instead, confidingly, making Orana look at him in surprise and then smile hesitantly back. "It's all in terrible shape by the time it comes here, but I mostly grew up on farms, and the smell of the clay and straw on the crates is a comfort." He paused a moment, and then took another step into the room, a frown settling on his brow. "Do you... miss Tevinter, Orana? Would you want to go back?"

Orana looked surprised by the question, at first -- and then, as it sank in, actually a touch horrified. "No, my lord," she said, with enough real dismay in it to set Elwyn's mind at ease somewhat. "I do miss my papa, and some of the other slaves I knew before, sometimes, but... I wouldn't want to go back now. I think -- I didn't understand how hard it was, before I came here, and things were different after so long. ...I'd rather be here."

"I'm glad to hear that," Elwyn said -- hoping that the softness of his tone could convey some sense that he understood, at least a little, that he recognized the courage that had brought her to being able to say so. "And I hope you'll tell me if there's anything else you need." Orana dropped him a small curtsy, as if by reflex, and he was about to turn to go before a return of his earlier thoughts stopped him. "Oh, ah, I meant to ask... I don't suppose anyone -- happened to stop by for me, this evening?"

Orana stared at him, and then her eyes widened again a bit. "Oh! You didn't -- ?" He frowned, and she caught herself up, floundering a moment before finding her thread again. "My lord, that's -- why you surprised me. I had thought sure you must have come back while I was cleaning, and gone upstairs without my hearing you. Master Fenris came to call when you were out, and he said that he would wait for you, and... I thought you must be upstairs visiting with him, because he didn't come back down."

Elwyn stared back at her for a moment, completely nonplussed. Finally, though, the slight worry starting in her eyes made him shake himself free and collect himself, and smile at her again reassuringly. "I see. That's fine, of course -- I'll... just go check in on him." He hesitated only another second, and then nodded to her, trying not to seem too hasty about it. "Good night, Orana."

"Good night, my lord."

Elwyn did his best not to race up the stairs, and paused a moment at his own closed bedroom door to collect himself, before opening it. He was already readying an apology as he did so, opening his mouth to speak it -- and then it died on his lips at once, when his first view inside was of the bed in front of him, and the dark-clad shape of Fenris stretched out on top of it, plainly asleep.

A broad smile replaced the words on his lips almost at once, and he turned to shut the door again behind him as quietly as possible, before making his way likewise into the room. Fenris had divested of his outer armor, which had been left neatly arrayed by the side of the bed, and lay on his side in his tunic and trousers on top of the covers, head dug into Elwyn's pillow and arm slung across his own narrow belly. Elwyn leaned on the post of the bed for a moment just to look past the curtain at him, sleeping: a sight he'd never seen more than a few seconds of, in all the time he'd known Fenris. The lines of his face looked slightly taut even asleep, his lips barely parted, and even so, newly vulnerable enough to make his trusting of that state to Elwyn's home and bed something that made his chest feel too small for the heart inside it, so its weight pressed tight to every wall.

"Fenris," he said softly, presently -- not wanting to lead with a touch, given all he remembered. Fenris stirred immediately in spite of his voice's quiet, though, opening his eyes to register Elwyn's face and then dropping them near-shut again in a bleary way that deepened Elwyn's smile. "I'm sorry to wake you. I didn't want to startle you."

"Mmh," Fenris agreed, and raised his hand to scrub over all of his face, yawning into its palm. He lowered it only to squint at Elwyn instead, with faint accusation. "You're late."

"I know. I'm sorry." Elwyn came around the bed more fully, resting on the edge of the mattress. "It took much longer than I'd hoped, but you'll be glad to know that in spite of that, it was _also_ a complete waste of time."

Fenris's mouth twisted in a slight smile, eyes still half-lidded. "Hm. No luck, then?"

"Not a bit. Just a great deal more of the same." He watched Fenris's eyes weigh heavier even as he said that much, though, and his smile couldn't help coming back in full force. "You can keep sleeping, if you'd like. It is late."

"I think that would be very poor etiquette as a guest," Fenris said, with a frown dividing his brows but also his eyes mostly shut. He yawned into his hand again after a moment, though, and then sighed, relaxing back into the bed. "Maybe... just for a moment. Make sure I'm rested enough to ravish you properly."

Elwyn laughed softly, mostly breath, and pushed back up from the bed again. "As long as you need. I'll be there in just a moment, if that's all right."

Fenris made a pleased, assenting sound, and then to all appearances fell asleep again immediately. Elwyn turned his smile to the business of removing his own outer garments, and then after barely any hesitation, just stripping to his skin entirely; it was how he preferred to sleep anyway, and there didn't seem to be much point being precious at this stage. He snuffed the candles and scattered what was left of the fire, soothing it with ash from the edges, and then untied his hair and climbed under the sheets and blankets of the bed next to Fenris's weight atop them. Fenris's sleep seemed sound by now, and Elwyn took care not to disturb him -- only curling close enough to feel him near, as he had once before, years ago.

\---

Elwyn startled out of sleep with a hiss of indrawn breath, his heart still thudding in his chest all the while that he tried to slow his breathing. The light was still dim with the early hour, and from only filtering through the cracks in the bedroom's drawn curtains, but it was something to anchor himself on and begin to feel more real, again a part of the present moment. After a few seconds of recovery, he was able to start to relax back into his skin, and blink around him. And nearly the first thing his eyes fell on was Fenris: lying on his side next to him in the bed and watching him, fully awake already.

"Good morning," Elwyn said, softly, his small smile growing realer with every second he looked at Fenris. "Did you sleep well?"

"Better than I intended to," Fenris said, with a touch of rueful amusement that made Elwyn's smile stronger still. He propped up on his elbows in front of him, curling in toward Elwyn. "Did you know you talk in your sleep?"

Elwyn hesitated, and then laughed a little, dropping his eyes. "I... do I? Carver complained a time or two, when we shared a room, but I was never sure if it was true or he just wanted something to complain about." Fenris smiled, and Elwyn hesitated another moment before speaking again, with half a smile of his own. "Did I -- say anything interesting?"

Fenris didn't immediately answer that; his smile had faded, and his gaze on Elwyn's face was uncomfortably intent. "You told me you didn't dream about the templar anymore," he said, after a moment. His voice held only the faintest hint of reproach. Elwyn caught up short, and then let out a long breath a moment later, pushing himself up on his elbows behind him as well. What he might have said while he slept, for Fenris to know that he had been dreaming of that day, he found he had no desire to know at all.

"I said I almost don't. It still crops up, now and again." He paused, thinking how to say the rest. "It seems like it's been coming back more often in the last year or so, in fact. Lately, though, it's been... different." Fenris tilted his head, and Elwyn considered again, looking away. "When I was younger, I was always -- myself, in the dream, if that makes the slightest sense. Reliving what happened, or something like it, from where I was at the time. But recently, I've still been seeing the same events, more or less, but from -- outside. As though I were someone else standing off some distance, watching." He hesitated once more, then pushed on: "I admit, at first when I dreamed of it that way, I honestly didn't recognize at once what I was seeing. All I saw was a full-grown templar in armor, cornering a small boy cowering away from him -- threatening to take him from his family and worse, if he didn't do what he was told. It was only when the worst moment came that I understood, and knew the moment for what it was." His mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "It was... surprising, how different it all looked from that perspective."

Fenris let the silence he lapsed into sit where it was, for a moment. "That seems a bit on the nose," he said at last, a touch drily though not altogether unkindly. Elwyn was surprised into a small laugh, and he met Fenris's eyes again with a knowing wryness.

"A bit," he said, and sighed as he leaned back on his elbows. "...I haven't changed my mind. We both know that child wasn't helpless, and no amount of seeing it differently will alter what happened. My intentions, my fear, how I might have been provoked... none of that brings him back to life, or cancels out his death." He thought for another moment, his gaze out-of-focus and inward. "I think instead, what I'm coming to understand is just... that there's another way of seeing most everything. Whether that other point of view is truly another legitimate one, or not, is a matter that may take more consideration. But... it isn't a virtue, not to think on it at all." After another brief pause, he added, "And no one sort of person has a monopoly on the power to do harm. If being frightened isn't an excuse, then that cuts both ways.."

He fell quiet again there, and neither of them said anything for a moment. Then finally, Fenris said, "Is this the sort of thing that's normally first out of your mouth when you wake?" Elwyn glanced over at him, newly startled, and found a glint of amusement waiting clear in his face. "Mind you, I'd believe it."

Elwyn laughed, and a little harder than he might have expected. "Oh, no, no, not at all. Sometimes I'm overly serious." Fenris laughed in soft answer, and Elwyn rolled onto his side to face him, smiling. "But you're right. That's more than enough about everyone else's nonsense for one morning."

Fenris eyed him a moment, and then smirked with sudden impishness, and reached to stroke his hand slowly over Elwyn's shoulder and down toward the middle of his chest, prickling gooseflesh in its wake. "Especially when I made a promise that I've yet to keep," he said. "I am much better rested now."

Elwyn grinned a bit in answer, even as he shivered, and his own hand settled over Fenris's to press it to his skin. "Well... I'm glad to hear it." He thought for only a second before adding in his most innocent tone, "I was actually wondering, though, if first you would let me suck you."

The wide-eyed look Fenris gave him at that was satisfying -- but still not as much as the fact that he might actually have been a bit flushed when he huffed out breath in a laugh. "...Were you expecting me to _refuse_?"

Elwyn shrugged, smiling, his thumb idly stroking the back of Fenris's hand. "You can," he said. "I've known men not to care for it. ...I would very much like to, though, if you'd want that."

"I would," Fenris said, and the slight dryness of his voice was another pleasure. Elwyn smiled, and pushed himself free of the blankets to sit up. Fenris rolled onto his back as Elwyn moved over him, propped halfway up on the pillow, the heat of his stare seeming to pierce right through the middle of Elwyn and throb in his gradually stiffening prick. He couldn't help pausing to stretch out over Fenris and kiss him, leaning on his elbow on the mattress. Fenris answered hungrily, reaching up to seize Elwyn's head in both hands and straining up into his mouth, and they only lingered there for a moment, luxuriating in the touch.

Eventually, Elwyn drew himself up again, just enough to free his hands and give them room to reach for the belt of Fenris's sleep-disheveled tunic -- and then he paused there, easing back out of the kiss to look seriously down at Fenris. "Is it all right for me to touch you?" he asked. "You seemed uneasy with it, before." That this was a particular place where he feared he'd pushed too hard, demanded too much, he chose not to say.

Fenris seemed a bit surprised by the question, but then he offered a slight smile. "It's fine. It's -- " He hesitated a second, his hands still tangled behind Elwyn's head. "The markings can be very sensitive, and not pleasantly so. Though I found, when it was you, it _was_ much more pleasant than I'd anticipated." He turned his gaze back up toward Elwyn, wry and regretful. "That was the problem, in fact. I didn't want to take pleasure in anything about them."

"And now?" Elwyn asked, still hovering. Fenris's smile broadened, became both more of a smirk and more true.

"And now, I think they're only mine, and I can do whatever I choose with them," he said, and turned his hand to rub its back along Elwyn's cheek and beard. "Yes. It's all right."

Elwyn nodded, smiling, and leaned in to drop another kiss on Fenris's mouth as he returned to unfastening the belt. Fenris helped him when he had unwrapped it, stripping out of the arms of his tunic and pushing up to wrestle it out from under himself, and then lay back down to add his hands to Elwyn's in pushing down his trousers as well. When they had finished undressing him, Elwyn took him at his word: resting his open palms just above Fenris's slim hips and then stroking them down to his upper thighs. Fenris hissed breath at the touch, his hips hitching up under Elwyn's hands. Elwyn moved with him when they did, sliding his hands down and underneath Fenris's thighs as he shouldered in between them, and settled himself with a familiar hand around under Fenris's hip and Fenris's legs canted up around him. His other hand closed around the thickening weight of Fenris's cock, already more than half-hard, and stroked it one slow deliberate time even as he was dipping his head to take it in his mouth.

Fenris gasped, the lines of his thighs trembling with new tension and his fingers clenching on Elwyn's upper arm; when Elwyn raised his eyes to look up the line of his body, he found Fenris collapsed back on the pillow with head tossed to the side, the muscles in his belly taut. The warm shape of him in Elwyn's mouth swelled ever harder, pressing against his tongue and lips, and Elwyn drew it deeper even as he parted his mouth to make way. His tongue smoothed along the bottom of Fenris's cock, helping to coax it further in until he had to make his muscles remember old habits and tricks just to allow it. The stretch in his mouth and throat, the faint salt taste of Fenris on his tongue, the sound of Fenris's ragged breathing, all joined to make his own prick flush fully hard so fast it dizzied him, made him shift his hips to drag it restlessly against the sheets.

"You look good like that," Fenris's voice said, thick and drowsy with desire, after a long moment of Elwyn settled there and working him softly. Elwyn raised his eyes again to find Fenris now looking down at him flushed, with half-lidded eyes and a curve to his parted lips, a sight that also made Elwyn's hips jut into the bed. One of Fenris's hands had lifted to his head, and traced the line of one of his braids, absently, as he spoke. Elwyn kept his pleasure in his eyes at first, and then as he drew himself wetly back up along Fenris's prick, let it slide from his lips completely so he could smile up at Fenris instead, replacing his mouth with a squeezing, stroking hand.

"I can't count the times I've thought of doing this," he said, his own voice already sounding just as rough. "...Athough, I have to admit, I always pictured being on my knees for you."

That made Fenris's breath stutter, and his cock definitively twitched in Elwyn's hand. Elwyn found himself immediately greedy for another thing to say that would do that to him -- more of the pleasure of bringing new color flushing up in Fenris's face. "Far be it from me to stop you," Fenris said a moment later, on a breath of a laugh, and that brought Elwyn's head up with bright eagerness.

"Then -- here -- "

He extricated himself from Fenris's legs and climbed over the side of the bed almost too quickly, and Fenris swung over to join him only seconds behind. Fenris had no sooner settled his spread legs over the mattress's edge and Elwyn pressed between them than he'd curled his hand back around Fenris's prick, and drawn it back to his lips. Kneeling on the tiles, with Fenris over and above him, just made his breath come up shorter as he sucked Fenris in, made his other hand drop to grip his own cock and squeeze it. He buried Fenris in his mouth again, took him deeper than ever when he could, and then drew himself slowly back to leave only the head inside, lashing it with soft smooth swirls of his tongue. Fenris's breath shook, a hand curling feather-light around the back of Elwyn's head again, just barely cupping it. Elwyn pressed in again, began to settle into a rhythm of pushing deep and dragging back along Fenris's length, caressing Fenris with his tongue. A small sound of pleasure rumbled from the back of his own throat, without his really meaning it to.

There was a depth of happiness he'd never known before in just being here: surrounded by Fenris, drawing every pleasure he possibly could from Fenris's body, which had weathered so much pain. Knowing that he could offer this again, another time, and it would be accepted. In time he tilted his head to look up again at Fenris's face, and found Fenris flushed and panting and nonetheless staring back at him, watching him work with intent hunger. He met Fenris's eyes a moment, stroking his own cock faster under their regard as he sucked Fenris deep, then lowered his eyes again to focus on the task of lavishing his tongue all down Fenris's length. He could still feel Fenris's gaze on him all the while, though, heating his skin wherever it came to rest.

It wasn't much longer before Fenris's thighs began to twitch around him, Fenris's fingers to flex and tremble where they rested on the back of his head. His breath was fast and labored, its mingling with the wet working of Elwyn's mouth the only sounds in the room. Every time Elwyn tightened his mouth around him or flickered his tongue, Fenris's muscles fluttered with it, and a small ragged sound escaped the back of Fenris's throat. Finally Fenris drew a deep, shaking breath, his hand smoothing mindlessly over Elwyn's hair.

"I'm -- getting very close to -- " he gasped between his breaths, by way of warning, but that was all Elwyn needed to hear. He released his own prick to surge forward and clasp his arm around Fenris's hips, pulling them hard into his mouth, while he pushed his head forward to take Fenris as far into his throat as he could. He let Fenris's tip touch the back of his throat with every short, fast motion of his head, mouth tight around the heated skin, hand rolling under Fenris's stones and rubbing just behind them.

The sudden onslaught was plainly far more than Fenris had expected, or could bear: a choked sound tore out of him, on its way to a shout, and his whole body jumped in Elwyn's grip as though with the effort of not fucking into Elwyn's mouth even harder. He spread open to it instead, trembling with exertion, and then came gasping out all his breath, his hand shuddering on Elwyn's head and cock pulsing on Elwyn's tongue as it spilled.

Elwyn stayed right in place through it, working his throat around the last twitches in Fenris's prick, until Fenris seemed still and he could draw back enough to swallow. Even that motion made Fenris hiss and twitch again, and Elwyn lingered only a moment before easing backward, letting Fenris's softening length slide from his mouth and then fully from his lips. He sat back on his knees, catching what of his breath he could, and looked back to find Fenris leaned back heavily on one arm, staring down at him with an unguarded, wide-eyed softness that both cramped around his heart and made his own throbbing prick suddenly unbearable. He seized it again and began to work it in his hand, warming with how Fenris's gaze dropped immediately to watch even in his entirely spent state.

"Let me?" Fenris asked, voice dusty and dry, after no more than a moment or two of watching Elwyn touch himself. He raised his eyes back to Elwyn's as he did with a slight lopsided smile, his breath still rough through it. Elwyn wasted no time -- staggering upright to the relief of his protesting knees, and then climbing up onto the bed as Fenris sat back to give him room and tugged him by his waist, to instead kneel straddled over Fenris's lap. Fenris wrapped his hand around Elwyn's cock and kissed him both at once, holding him in close by the grip around his back. Elwyn clung to his shoulders and panted against his mouth, the slow stroke of Fenris's hand on him flooding him with heat enough to prickle sweat along his skin

Fenris's hand picked up speed quickly, and soon Elwyn was straining his hips toward it, the kiss growing softer and messier with the growing clumsiness of his mouth. He was already near coming, dizzy with the perfect tight grasp around him and the taste of both Fenris's mouth now and his seed still lingering. In the end, all it took to push him over was Fenris releasing his mouth to tongue instead at the lobe of his ear, and tightening his grip on a few strokes of his hand with his thumb rolling across Elwyn's head at the end of each. Elwyn gasped, his spine stiffening and hands clenching on Fenris's shoulders, thighs shuddering around his hips, and spilled hot and wet over Fenris's hand and between them.

They sat together for a long moment, breathing hard, heads leaned against each other and Elwyn's cock softening in the circle of Fenris's hand. Finally he climbed off of Fenris's lap to one side, wincing, and turned back to kiss Fenris another long, lazy time.

Eventually he staggered up from the bed to fetch a damp rag from the basin, and bring it back for them both to clean themselves up. They tumbled back on the bed after, kissing again, and lay there for a time doing and thinking of nothing else, one stroking the other's back and the other the first's cheek, legs tangling. And before much longer, they had both ended up dozing again, Elwyn's arms loosely around Fenris and Fenris's head pillowed on Elwyn's chest.

\---

It was full daylight by the time he woke again, and the warm weight putting his arm to sleep forestalled at once any fear he might have had of the past repeating. Fenris stirred when he was freeing himself, though, opening his eyes to exchange drowsy smiles, and they lay together for some uncountable time, touching, curled together, talking of nothing whatsoever of consequence. In time Elwyn managed to tear himself away and wrap in a robe to make an extremely sheepish trek to the kitchen, in deference to the advanced hour, but found instead that Orana had left a covered tray with a meal for two politely just outside the door. Fenris gave him a curious look when he brought it in, but Elwyn found he had already decided not to think about any of it too closely.

Once they had eaten and set the tray aside, they fell to kissing again soon after, and before long Fenris had rolled on top of Elwyn to claim his mouth with increasing determination. Elwyn was a bit out of breath by the time Fenris drew himself up again, looking down at him with heated half-lidded eyes, and already shamelessly rolling his hips up against Fenris's.

"Would you want me inside you again?" Fenris asked, still holding his gaze. Elwyn's breath caught at that, which seemed to please him.

"Of course," Elwyn said in a rush, almost laughing it, arms curled around Fenris's back. "Do you want that?"

Fenris huffed out a breath, smiling a bit down at him. "I would say I've... obsessed on it to an unseemly degree," he said, making Elwyn breathe a laugh but also drawing out another lazy pump of his hips. "I thought so often of the way you felt, the way you looked under me: writhing and desperate, trying to draw me deeper..." He paused, lingering in both their unsteadying breath. "I never thought I'd enjoy seeing a mage lose control."

"I never thought I'd enjoy losing it." Elwyn took a breath, letting his eyes flutter briefly closed. "Please. I've wanted it too, so much. Fuck me."

Fenris's breath shivered, and he seized on Elwyn's mouth again, driving his tongue between Elwyn's lips and pressing down on top of him. They rolled together in a slow grind, before finally parting for a bit more murmured conversation, and then for Fenris to rise and return with oil to the side of the bed. Elwyn pushed toward him, and Fenris leaned over to drag his hips to the mattress's edge where he stood, settling Elwyn's legs around him. He slicked his hand and bent over Elwyn on the bed to press a hand under and a finger inside him, making Elwyn hiss shaking breath and his knees draw up to either side, his cock thickening fully where it rested on his belly. Fenris lingered much longer than necessary, watching his face with intent hunger: working his finger with maddening slowness, pushing it deeper to tease at where it made Elwyn gasp and all of him twitch. He kept its rhythm steady so long that soon Elwyn was squirming needfully into his hand and into the empty air, hands clenched tight in the wreck of the sheets and breath panting out of him, sweat beading along his forehead. There was a bit of a wicked curve to Fenris's parted lips by the time he withdrew his hand, making Elwyn swallow with both the sight of it and the loss.

Fenris oiled himself in a few strokes that were perfunctory by comparison, and lifted Elwyn's hips and legs easily up toward him, making more heat throb into Elwyn's cock with the reminder of his strength and his own willing helplessness to it. Fenris guided his tip to and into Elwyn, and as he slid fully inside, Elwyn took up the work of bracing his feet against the edge of the bed and tilting up his hips to meet the thrust. He groaned through his teeth as Fenris found his depth in him, nerves sparking and muscles fluttering around the thickness of Fenris's cock, pure relief at last from years of longing that his own memory and fingers had never been enough to ease. Soon, Fenris began to move, and Elwyn moved with him.

The added leverage of Fenris standing soon proved to be everything he might have hoped -- letting Fenris's prick slide more smoothly into him and out again, and drive each stroke so deep at its bottom that his breath came up short and vision seemed to blur, more so the further he pushed up his legs. Eventually Fenris lifted from leaning on the bed to take hold of his thighs, raising Elwyn's knees up over his own arms; with Elwyn spread open to him more than ever, every thrust was almost too much, and then Fenris braced on the mattress again and squeezed his hand around Elwyn's cock. A ragged sound tore out of Elwyn, creaking in his throat, and all he could do was arch and flex himself into Fenris's cock and hand, caught between them and entirely overwhelmed. His hands groped up to Fenris's side and planted arm, curling tight around them just for something to hold on to.

Fenris's hips drove into him even as he did, pushing in faster each time, and Elwyn looked up through the swimming of his head to see Fenris staring down at him, flushed and hungry and urgent. Elwyn stared back and then gave him a slight, breathy smile, and arched his back again with full deliberation, grinding against Fenris's hips to meet his thrusts. "Look what you do to me," he said, mostly breath and trembling, moving against Fenris in tidal surges. "Only you."

He thought Fenris's eyes widened, and then Fenris's head dropped forward on a gasp of breath, his hand around Elwyn's cock moving in quick ragged strokes even as the rhythm of his hips sped in a way that seemed purely instinctive. It was everything Elwyn could have wanted, and he just tried to move with it as much as he took it, sense and coherence dissolving into nothing but heat and motion and pleasure. He was already too close to coming, the sensations and knowledge of Fenris's hand on him and cock inside him forming an impossibly heady mixture. Either fortunately or unfortunately, though, he didn't think Fenris was in much better straits, given the growing ferocity of each snap of his hips. They both could only ride it out, for as long as they could, and see where it led.

After some endless time more, when Fenris's breath had begun to come over shaky and labored and loud and the muscles under Elwyn's hands to tremble in occasional fits, Elwyn smoothed both his own shaking hands up along Fenris's skin and pulled at him. "Are you -- close?" he gasped, having to gulp his way through nearly every word. "Are you going to come?"

Fenris shuddered under his hands and nodded, a wild jerk of his head. Elwyn pushed himself back down flat on the bed in answer, letting his arms fall into a lazy tumble around his head even as his lower half was in such ardent use.

"Do it on me," he managed, his chest heaving with the effort of it. "Please. I want to see that I'm yours."

That seemed to snap at once whatever fine thread Fenris had left for control. He made a hard growling sound, animal and desperate, and released Elwyn where he touched him as though Elwyn's skin were white-hot; he slid out almost fast enough to burn, as well, making Elwyn shudder and catch himself behind him even as he replaced Fenris's stroking hand with his own. Then Fenris was leaning craned over Elwyn's prone form on the bed, only flashes of his hot wild expression visible through the fall of his hair, and jerking short fast strokes over his cock that Elwyn mirrored below him -- and then he was shouting, his back bowing, his cock spilling in thick lines over Elwyn's belly just as he'd been asked. Elwyn gasped, hips jumping into his own hand, all thought gone in buzzing lust, and came only seconds later, his own seed lacing over Fenris's under the swift firm tugs of his hand.

They hovered there a second or two, and then Fenris drew a long shivering breath. " _Hawke,_ " he let it out on, a desperate rush that he made sound like an oath in itself, and collapsed onto his side on the mattress beside Elwyn, shoulders already shaking on a soundless laugh. "...I can't imagine how the farmers' sons of Lothering survived you."

Elwyn grinned around his own still-heaving breaths, turning his head to squint back at Fenris's amused gaze. It seemed most prudent not to point out how specifically that suggested Fenris had fixed on that detail in the story. "Well, I like to -- think I've improved since then." He lay another second or two catching his breath, slowing his heart, and then rolled over fully toward Fenris, reaching to touch him. "Good?"

Fenris could only seem to answer with an unsteady laugh; but his hand folded over Elwyn's on his chest, and after a moment, brought it to his lips.

\---

Elwyn had every good intention of eventually rising and dressing and doing something with the day like civilized people, but it was quickly clear that it was not to be. They cleaned up again, dozed again, talked and touched and kissed and ended up having sex again, and that pattern seemed to repeat from the beginning every time he thought it was done. Whenever it seemed that he was finally sated, that he could suggest mustering themselves to some other purpose, he had only to look over at Fenris on the other side of the bed -- stretched out naked and entirely mussed and flushed from their exertions, watching him with half-lidded eyes -- to be caught in the snare all over again.

The rest of that day would be blissfully fragmentary in his memory, when he looked back on it later: being tired and sore and excited and content and carried off by lust in turn, with no logic or order to any of it at all. At one time he was leaned up haphazardly in the corner of the bed, clinging to the bedpost above his head with his hips lifted up, Fenris grinding into him in long and slow strokes from beneath, kissing his throat; at another he was curled up in Fenris so tightly he could barely tell where one of them ended and the other began, trying to keep kissing but unable for how hard they were both laughing at some foolishness or other. He drowsed in Fenris's arms, woke to the promise of more every time, with disbelieving gratitude still woven all through every moment when Fenris looked at him and smiled, and kissed him.

At one point Elwyn had risen to make another vain effort at cleaning himself up, and at the sight of himself in the mirror over the basin, could only snort laughter. "I'm going to have to ask Orana to rebraid these," he said, tugging at the mess of his hair and meeting Fenris's eyes with a smile in reflection. "It's a pity; she just put them in only a fortnight past."

"She tends your hair?" Fenris asked, amused and skeptical, and Elwyn turned back to him hesitating with a small sheepish smile.

"She does. Someone has to do it, and I can't. Mother always did before, but..." Fenris's gaze softened at that, and Elwyn came back to the bed, switching from the subject quickly. "I do pay her a bonus for barbering. I know it's above and beyond her duties." He considered a moment, and then sighed, the rueful smile returning. "I probably owe her another just for today in general."

"I think by now you probably pay her more in a year than you earn yourself," Fenris said, offering him a lazy smile and a hand along his shoulder as he settled back close. Elwyn laughed, resting his arm back around Fenris's waist.

"Well, she deserves it more than I do." He paused a moment, considering, and then met Fenris's eyes. "She asks after you, you know, when you haven't been by. I think she's a bit in awe of you."

That seemed to take Fenris entirely aback, and he blinked back at Elwyn "Of me? What for?"

Elwyn stroked Fenris's hip, just a bit of a smile lingering. "You're a hero to her. You rescued her." At the beginning of Fenris's scoffing expression, he added, "And I think it makes a real impression -- for you to be so much like her in some ways, and yet to be so far beyond anything she could have imagined, a few short years ago. She sees what you've become, and it amazes her. I think it... inspires her, rather, to see in you what's possible. Even after everything."

Fenris was quiet for a long moment after that, no longer meeting Elwyn's eyes. "I wouldn't consider myself to set a particularly good example," he said at last, and his voice was perhaps too carefully even. He took a breath before Elwyn could say anything, though, looking at some empty space across the room. "I... have avoided her, for the most part, I admit. I frightened her at first, I know, and I suppose I never moved beyond that. And for a long time, I did not wish to be reminded of what she represented." He glanced back at Elwyn, finally, with a complexity of sorrow and hope in his eyes that made Elwyn's clasp around his waist tighten. "But she doesn't represent anything, really. She is only herself. And... perhaps it would be good to speak with her, sometime."

Elwyn smiled, just holding on to him. "I think she would like that."

\---

By the time it grew dark in the bedroom again, they managed to pull themselves together slightly, at least enough that Elwyn could slip out to reassure Mugwort's prodding nose that they yet lived, and make a very shamefaced request to Orana that supper also be brought up to his room. They were both ravenous by then, and ate sprawled together on the floor at the foot of the bed, pausing very little to talk until they had done. After a while longer, they only ended up back in the genuine disaster of the sheets, pillows heaped up under them to keep them propped up with Elwyn sprawled across Fenris's chest.

"I think," Elwyn said at last, with a heavy sigh in the middle, "that eventually, we _are_ going to have to get out of bed."

Fenris made a low, forbidding sound, his hand running idly over Elwyn's back. "Hmm. No. I don't approve of that."

Elwyn laughed without much sound, only his shoulders shaking on top of Fenris. "It's true, though," he said, apologetically. "At the very least, I'll need to check that Isabela hasn't caused another international incident, or Anders decided to prove how harmless mages are by setting someone on fire. ...Himself included." Fenris snorted, shaking his head.

"Leave him to it. Perhaps if you _don't_ clean up his mess for once, he'll finally learn something." Elwyn half-smiled, resettling the pillow of his arm between his chin and Fenris.

"It'd be very nice if I thought that were true." He paused for a moment, and then frowned up at Fenris belatedly, tilting his head up. "...'For once'? Are you implying something?"

Fenris was no longer looking at him, but his mouth was slightly sour. "You can't deny you've spent more time than strictly necessary trying to convince him of his wrongheadedness," he said, with forced neutrality, toward the wall. "Even when it's clear that it's done nothing. I think he's come to rather depend on it, don't you?"

Elwyn watched Fenris's face a long moment after he had lapsed into quiet, still frowning, and then at last pushed himself up on his elbows to look more closely. "Are you... _jealous_? Of _Anders_?"

The way Fenris froze was at least as telling as the length of his pause. He wasn't much for bluffing, most of the time. "...No."

"You _are_. Maker's breath."

"Well, he certainly hasn't been shy about his interest," Fenris said, almost cutting him off, glaring at Elwyn with less heat than simple wet-cat indignity. "The amount of time he spends trailing after you, harping -- he might as well be a child in the play-yard, pulling your twin tails."

"Whatever he might be doing to my twin tails, when have I ever shown the slightest interest in him?" Fenris only continued glaring, and Elwyn sighed, unable to keep the corners of his mouth from pulling. "I can't believe you. _Anders_? Really?"

"All right, that's quite enough," Fenris started, but Elwyn was beyond restraint, toppling off Fenris to land on his back beside him.

"Yes, you've caught me. Six years of pining after you was all part of my cunning plan to seduce the possessed, willful egoist I can't exchange two sentences with and not end up in a fight." He pressed a hand to his chest, dramatically. "I don't know what's more attractive to me: the complete opposition to everything I value, or the refusal to listen to a word I say."

"Do you know, I think I was right the first time," Fenris said, dry as bone, although his own mouth was twitching beyond all control. "All mages are evil. It's endemic."

"'Oh, _Anders_ ,'" Elwyn declared, as though he hadn't heard, fluttering his eyelashes. "'Do read to me again from your manifesto, won't you? You know how we _both_ love the sound of your voice.'"

Fenris stabbed a finger out to point up past the bed. "So help me, I will throw you straight out that window -- "

He was able to go no further with that, though, for laughing, and Elwyn laughing with him; and then they had both rolled together and were kissing again, and nothing else was said for a while longer.

When they had recovered themselves this time, lying again in a lazy breathless heap, Elwyn at last pointed out with good humor that they were both absolutely befouled. Fenris was content to wait while he drew and brought water, and even to only watch with mild interest when Elwyn used magic to heat the tub. They both climbed in together, Elwyn seated between Fenris's thighs and with his back against Fenris's chest. In deference to exhaustion and the close space, actually washing was a slow and desultory affair, proceeding little by little as they mostly just lay together in the heat.

"How are you feeling?" Elwyn asked after a time of peaceful silence, with his head tucked against the curve of Fenris's neck. There was a particular softness to his tone that he supposed Fenris could leave alone, or take him up on, as he chose. Fenris was quiet a second or two more, and then made a soft, amused sound.

"Foolish, mostly." Elwyn craned his head to the side to turn a curious look up to him, and Fenris smiled back without really meeting it. "...This all could have happened years ago, if I had said something sooner. I could have had you all this time."

Elwyn considered that a moment, watching the side of his face. "You weren't ready then," he said, quietly. "We're here now. I think that's enough."

Fenris looked at him at last, sidelong, and a slight gentle curve crept into his mouth even as he laced his wet fingers into Elwyn's over his chest. "It could never be enough," he said, and pressed a kiss to Elwyn's brow even as Elwyn laughed. "But it's a start, yes."

Elwyn smiled, settling back on Fenris again even as he made a vague fumble for the cake of soap without looking. "I suppose we need to do a lot of catching up, then," he said, aiming his smile behind him when he passed the soap back to Fenris. "Assuming you're all right with that."

"I think I could make some time," Fenris said, a smile in his own voice. Elwyn could only answer it as he leaned his head back on Fenris's shoulder, and closed his eyes..


	4. epilogue

"Are you certain about this?" Fenris asked, still only hovering behind him. "I think this is your last chance to change your mind."

Elwyn nodded, then tipped his head forward again and held it still. "I'm certain. I don't think this kind of upkeep is well-suited to a fugitive's life."

"Hmm, yes," Fenris agreed from behind him, while lifting absently at the braids of Elwyn's hair with his fingers. "That's why I had to chop off my long, flowing locks when I fled, after all."

Elwyn paused for a long moment. "...I _sincerely_ hope you aren't joking."

Fenris chuckled. "I'll never tell." He pressed a repressive hand against the back curve of Elwyn's skull for a moment, before lifting a particular braid from the front to start with. "Now stop making me laugh while I have a pair of shears pointed at your head. You won't like how that turns out."

"I trust you," Elwyn said, smiling as he closed his eyes. He thought Fenris's silence might have been telling, but chose not to draw attention to it.

The weather had turned fair up in the hills outside the city, and Elwyn enjoyed the slight breeze and sun on his skin while Fenris worked, the warmth of the rock he sat on.The shears, borrowed from the oddly magpie-ish cornucopia of Merrill's knapsack, sliced through the roots of his braids one by one as Fenris lifted them, making their methodical way across his head. It seemed curiously anticlimactic, after wearing the braids for so long, that it could all come away so easily: just a few snips to leave him bare of all that work and time.

When he opened his eyes again, the snicking of the shears fading into the background, he could see Merrill herself some distance away, ahead of them and off to one side. She was crouched down beside Isabela, with Mugwort running about just beyond them and snapping at butterflies in the grass, and appeared to be explaining something about the plants growing on the hillside, smiling as she pointed out differences. No telling where Varric had gotten off to, for now. Elwyn liked much better to see the handfuls of roots and crumbles of dirt in Merrill's hands than he had the clumsy tools with which she had tried to ply that cursed mirror, and even more so than the runnels of blood over her knuckles where its shattered glass had cut her in the end. It seemed to him that there were all sorts of ways to keep the traditions of one's people alive, some much better than others -- although he felt it would be condescending in the extreme to say so. 

Aveline had already left them: she'd peeled off when they'd reached the city limits, on that same night that everything had gone so cataclysmically wrong, and doubled back to the keep, to try to take the guard in hand. She had promised to send word if reinforcements arrived, one way or another, and for now they were only trusting her and making their way deeper into the mountains on foot. He imagined the others would have to go as well, in time, and he himself might even return to the city eventually when things had calmed, to hide himself better as a needle in the haystack of Kirkwall's low places. But for now, it was actually rather pleasant to be out in the fresh air, making camp in the shadows of rugged hills as though they were nothing more than a group of friends on a journey. The only thing that worried him was whether Bodahn and Sandal had gotten away safely -- if they had taken Orana with them, and protected her. He hoped they were all well and together, on their way to some new place to dwell.

"Did I do the right thing?" he asked, softly, after Fenris had been working and they had both been silent for some long minutes. The sound and tug of the shears paused a moment, although Fenris did not immediately answer.

"You'll have to be more specific," Fenris said at last, and returned to lopping off the last of the braids. "It's been a very busy few days." Elwyn smiled, unseen with Fenris working behind him, and looked down at the grass between his feet.

"You know what I mean," he said. Fenris only worked a few seconds longer, then sighed.

"You already know what I think," Fenris said, stooping to one side to set aside the small heap of hair he'd cut free, and then standing back up with the shears to set to work evening out what was left on Elwyn's head. "Why trouble to ask me?"

"Because I want to hear it." Elwyn closed his eyes again, as the shears worked, his hands laced between his knees. "You have a point of view in all this as well, and an important one, I think. It should never be far from my mind."

"I'm glad to be of service," Fenris said, drily, although with no real bite in it. He was quiet and focused for some time more, before he began to speak again. "I told you at the time that I thought the templars were justified in their decision. I never took any pleasure in the idea, but I believed that annulment would save more innocent lives, on balance, than any other course of action. I'm still not convinced that it wouldn't have been so." He paused again, his thoughtfulness plain in the tension of the silence. "But all the same, Meredith was beyond sense. And more to the point... I know that you didn't see it that way. You thought more quickly than I might have on the innocent lives that might be inside the Gallows as well as out, still locked away: mages who might never have done any harm, even in their own defense. ...Or children, who might in terror have been cornered into a terrible mistake, which would scar all of their lives to come." Elwyn's laced fingers knotted white-knuckled tight, and Fenris paused a moment even in his trimming to take a breath. "I don't even know which of us was right, if either was. It was enough for me. Whatever you might ask me now, I know you thought it was the right thing to do. And my trust in you is such that I need no more than that."

They were both silent on the heels of that: Fenris tilting Elwyn's head to clip along its curve, and Elwyn struggling to speak.

"May I always be worthy of that trust," he said finally, his voice dusty and low. "May I never stop trying to deserve it."

"You won't," Fenris said, though, almost at once, with perhaps a touch of a smile in his voice now. "I know you well enough to know that."

Elwyn let his own lips form in a faint twist; and he thought of Anders, the other piece that he would not ask about. He did regret Anders, much more than he did being unable to stand for the idea of slaughtering prisoners still in their cells, even though he knew Fenris wouldn't understand, and wouldn't much appreciate hearing it. He could wish now that it had not been necessary to do what he had done, in spite of how he had felt instead in the moment: furious beyond reason on a hundred levels, wounded to his core by what Anders had tried to make him party to. Could Anders have understood what it would have done to him, what it would have meant to him, if he had not refused that day -- if he had been a part of what Anders had done? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe Anders had been able, in the end, to see nothing and no one else beyond what obsessed him. Maybe he had understood nothing at all.

In any case, it lingered behind his eyes regardless of what he had and hadn't done to regret: the wash of red darkening down Anders's coat from his own knife, a stain on the back instead of the chest but not so much different for that. But this, he felt no less sure now than ever, had been necessary. Which raised the grim, unthinkable specter that perhaps _both_ had been necessary -- but that did not in itself make either forgivable. There would be more dreams ahead of him, he felt sure... but it was also a bearable idea, somehow, in a way it had never been when he was young. There was a difference between what you stumbled into, maybe, and what you stepped off the edge of willingly. Regretting the choice didn't make it the wrong one. Or the other way around, for that matter.

With a few last clips of the shears, Fenris finished, and he brushed the curve of Elwyn's skull for a moment to push away stray hair. "There," he said, and finally relented to let Elwyn feel over his own head and explore the new terrain. Just a close skim of wiry curls over the skin, and nothing more. "It's not perfect, but it'll be easier to even out with time."

Elwyn nodded, still tracing self-conscious fingertips around the side of his head. "I'll trim my beard myself a bit later. It seems like it would be odd to leave it longer." He dropped his hand away finally, and rolled his head on his shoulders a bit, feeling all the differences in the sensation, the breeze on his scalp. "Thank you."

"Of course." There was a brief, busy pause, and then Fenris came around him to sit beside him on the rock, pressed hip-to-hip at his side. He turned and leaned back to look at Elwyn straight on, in critical appraisal, and his mouth turned in a bit of a smile at the end of it. "It looks good," he said. "Though I think you could do most anything with it and achieve that effect." Elwyn smiled, and Fenris went on looking at him for a long moment. "How do you feel?"

"Lighter," Elwyn said, after a moment's consideration. And though Fenris laughed a bit, he hadn't meant the answer to be anything but honest.

**Author's Note:**

> The quote at the beginning comes from the lyrics to "Done Bleeding," by The Mountain Goats.
> 
> I also want to note that [serenityfails](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/pseuds/serenityfails)'s beautiful comic ["wait"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9224306) set in motion a lot of the thought processes that ended up going into this story.
> 
> Also, all opinions expressed by Elwyn Hawke on various in-world matters and other characters are his own, and not necessarily the author's. Just for the record.
> 
> (It doesn't really come up, but as a point of interest, the Hero of Ferelden in this continuity is [Jady Brosca](https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Jady%20Brosca).)


End file.
